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Classics you couldn't finish

211 replies

Tambatamba · 05/09/2023 05:07

For me, Dracula. As compelling as it was, I had to stop reading it because I found it so sad and depressing.

OP posts:
clowniform · 05/09/2023 09:37

Like @Random789 verbose Victorians are my chocolate bar comfort reads, but I find the big Russian classics a struggle. War&Peace, Master&Margarita, Dead Souls... maybe I need to try one of the derided Victorian translations.

MissLucyEyelesbarrow · 05/09/2023 09:40

LunaNorth · 05/09/2023 08:13

I’ve been trying to finish Pride and Prejudice for 34 years.

I must have another bash soon. It’s weird - I love Northanger Abbey, adore Persuasion…but I can’t get on with P&P.

Love P&P and NA. Quite fond of MP, despite Fanny. S&S & Emma - meh. Persuasion bores me to the point that (spoiler alert) I want to chuck myself off the cobb at Lyme Regis.

Unpopular opinions: 1) Emma is more annoying than Fanny. (2) Henry Tilney would be a far better husband than Mr Darcy.

BigMadAdrian · 05/09/2023 09:41

I can't believe I am typing this but I think I am about to DNF Mansfield Park. It's a shock, as I love JA - I'd never read this one (also haven't read S&S). I have just read the chapter where Henry Crawford has told Mary how much he adores Fanny - I didn't really get the extent of his feelings from the adaptations I've seen - and I really want him to be a reformed rake and for her not to marry that boring, pompous hypocrite Edmund (who doesn't love her even half as much as HC), so I think I might leave it there. I know what happens. I love the writing, as always, but am deeply unhappy with the story.

Other than that I have never got on with Dickens and have always despised Wuthering Heights, although I did finish the bloody awful thing, as I studied it for GCSE.

StellaOlivetti · 05/09/2023 09:46

I did English at university and mostly love the classics. I did a module on Dickens so I think I’ve read most of them, and enjoyed them. And I absolutely loved Middlemarch. Classics I’ve hated are Ulysses ( tried several times and come to the conclusion it’s unreadable - by me, anyway); Crime and Punishment, War and Peace.

MissLucyEyelesbarrow · 05/09/2023 09:52

have always despised Wuthering Heights

The most over-rated book in English Lit, IMO. Everyone in it needs a good slap.

Carebearstare12e · 05/09/2023 09:53

MissLucyEyelesbarrow · 05/09/2023 09:52

have always despised Wuthering Heights

The most over-rated book in English Lit, IMO. Everyone in it needs a good slap.

Yes. EMO over a hundred years before EMO was a thing.

KohlaParasaurus · 05/09/2023 09:55

I could put all the books mentioned so far into three lists. Books I Read Again And Again, Books I Quite Enjoyed Once, and (shamefully, the longest) Books I Never Got Round To Starting. The only classics I remember not finishing were Ulysses and War and Peace. In both cases, I was finding them laborious, put them aside temporarily because my brain needed a palate-cleanser, and didn't get round to picking them up again.

Random789 · 05/09/2023 10:01

I can't believe I am typing this but I think I am about to DNF Mansfield Park. It's a shock, as I love JA

I have a hunch that whichver Austen novel you read first stays with you as such a perfect crystalline joy that when you eagerly move on to others she has written you feel furious and wretched because they are not your JA Beloved First.

I was certainly like that after reading Pride and Prejudice (my own JA Beloved First). Took me a while to get past that and gobble up the others.

Particularly Emma. I didn't read that until relatively recently, in my 50s!!! It is perhaps her most accomplished book, brilliant and hugely enjoyable, but the first sentence got my hackles up, made me think I would never like the eponymous emma. I see now that its statement of her extreme (and annoying) good fortune is ironic, in the same way as the first sentence of P&P is ironic. Though privileged of course, she has the extreme burden of her feeble and grasping dad, so that she has to give up on all ideas of love and marriage, even to the extent of deluding herself into believing she doesn't want them. Horrible old man.

Turtlegurl888 · 05/09/2023 10:02

I did English at uni and there were so many. It really put me off reading for pleasure for years.

One that sticks out is Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. Incredibly difficult to read.

Random789 · 05/09/2023 10:06

Wuthering Heights is weird. Like some kind of adolescent fan fiction. It reads like something Emily B should have put into a drawer for ten years and then extensively revised into the Best Novel Ever Written

WearyLady · 05/09/2023 10:07

Anything by Tolkien. Just can't bear it!

NoWordForFluffy · 05/09/2023 10:17

BigMadAdrian · 05/09/2023 09:41

I can't believe I am typing this but I think I am about to DNF Mansfield Park. It's a shock, as I love JA - I'd never read this one (also haven't read S&S). I have just read the chapter where Henry Crawford has told Mary how much he adores Fanny - I didn't really get the extent of his feelings from the adaptations I've seen - and I really want him to be a reformed rake and for her not to marry that boring, pompous hypocrite Edmund (who doesn't love her even half as much as HC), so I think I might leave it there. I know what happens. I love the writing, as always, but am deeply unhappy with the story.

Other than that I have never got on with Dickens and have always despised Wuthering Heights, although I did finish the bloody awful thing, as I studied it for GCSE.

I studied Wuthering Heights at both A Level and degree level! I studied King Lear for both too. I don't mind either.

MrsDanversGlidesAgain · 05/09/2023 10:24

I have just read the chapter where Henry Crawford has told Mary how much he adores Fanny - I didn't really get the extent of his feelings from the adaptations I've seen - and I really want him to be a reformed rake and for her not to marry that boring, pompous hypocrite Edmund (who doesn't love her even half as much as HC), so I think I might leave it there. I know what happens. I love the writing, as always, but am deeply unhappy with the story

I recently re-read MP and amused myself for a bit contemplating what the Henry Crawford- Fanny Price marriage might be like. He's clearly in awe of her superior moral virtues and if they married I think he probably always would be - he seems self-aware enough to know what his failings are - but I think after a while she'd bore him. He'd get fed up with the implied disapproval of his behaviour (because, let's face it, she is a bit of a fun sponge) and the 'lie back and think of England' sex (because I can't see her relaxing and enjoying herself however coaxing and persuasive he is). I think after a couple of years of being the faithful husband and revert to (discreetly unfaithful) type and she'd immerse herself in motherhood and good works. It's pretty clear that she despises him and his lifestyle and I can't see how marriage would change that.

Re Edmund/Fanny - JA hurries through that denouement so fast it's clear to me that this isn't the romance of the century and that a part of Edmund's heart is always going to be with the bad girl who got away.

Dickens - good point from a poster about the originals being serialised and not being meant to read in one gulp, as it were - probably why TV adaptations work so well. I might start watching some of those.

MrsDanversGlidesAgain · 05/09/2023 10:27

Turtlegurl888 · 05/09/2023 10:02

I did English at uni and there were so many. It really put me off reading for pleasure for years.

One that sticks out is Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. Incredibly difficult to read.

Moll Flanders is hilarious. She loses track of how many children and husbands she has (even to the point of marrying bigamously and incestuously, IIRC) but she always knows to the farthing how much money she has. And Defoe pulls off a narrator of both wide eyed 'the world done me wrong' innocence and hard headed calculation brilliantly.

Cincinnatus · 05/09/2023 10:28

Crime and Punishment… very heavy

Do88byisfree · 05/09/2023 10:29

Like others, I just can't read Lord of the Rings. Once I start a book, I can usually push through until the end. I've tried with LOTR several times but last time reconciled myself to the fact that it's a book I will never ever finish.

Turtlegurl888 · 05/09/2023 10:32

MrsDanversGlidesAgain · 05/09/2023 10:27

Moll Flanders is hilarious. She loses track of how many children and husbands she has (even to the point of marrying bigamously and incestuously, IIRC) but she always knows to the farthing how much money she has. And Defoe pulls off a narrator of both wide eyed 'the world done me wrong' innocence and hard headed calculation brilliantly.

Show quote history

I just found it a proper slog. The language was very different to the 19th century works I had been used to up to then. I might appreciate it more now, as an 18 year old it was a bore.

EmilyBrontesGhost · 05/09/2023 10:44

have always despised Wuthering Heights

That statement might come back to haunt you . . .

BigMadAdrian · 05/09/2023 10:49

MrsDanversGlidesAgain · 05/09/2023 10:24

I have just read the chapter where Henry Crawford has told Mary how much he adores Fanny - I didn't really get the extent of his feelings from the adaptations I've seen - and I really want him to be a reformed rake and for her not to marry that boring, pompous hypocrite Edmund (who doesn't love her even half as much as HC), so I think I might leave it there. I know what happens. I love the writing, as always, but am deeply unhappy with the story

I recently re-read MP and amused myself for a bit contemplating what the Henry Crawford- Fanny Price marriage might be like. He's clearly in awe of her superior moral virtues and if they married I think he probably always would be - he seems self-aware enough to know what his failings are - but I think after a while she'd bore him. He'd get fed up with the implied disapproval of his behaviour (because, let's face it, she is a bit of a fun sponge) and the 'lie back and think of England' sex (because I can't see her relaxing and enjoying herself however coaxing and persuasive he is). I think after a couple of years of being the faithful husband and revert to (discreetly unfaithful) type and she'd immerse herself in motherhood and good works. It's pretty clear that she despises him and his lifestyle and I can't see how marriage would change that.

Re Edmund/Fanny - JA hurries through that denouement so fast it's clear to me that this isn't the romance of the century and that a part of Edmund's heart is always going to be with the bad girl who got away.

Dickens - good point from a poster about the originals being serialised and not being meant to read in one gulp, as it were - probably why TV adaptations work so well. I might start watching some of those.

You are right - he would have got bored of her in the end, but I think he would have always been kind to her, even if the adoration did wear off. He is a different class of rake to Willoughby or Wickham - so much more likeable. Mary too. And I think that is the big problem with reading MP with a modern mindset - we are far less shocked by the Crawfords than contemporary readers would have been.

Trickedbyadoughnut · 05/09/2023 10:51

Crime and Punishment was my worst, kept trying to get through it as I studied it at uni. We read some of it in class, which I think is all I read of it. But never read it through and had to look up how it ended. And now I can't even remember what I looked up. I think I've blocked it out. I had to do an essay in an exam comparing it to Brothers Karamazov, which was fun, given I only got about a chapter into that one.

I am surprised so many people have mentioned A Tale of Two Cities - it has a home on my shelf as one I loved and won't give away (but will never read again as too sad!). I think the only other Dickens I've read is Hard Times, though, as we had to study the industrial novel at A level. I quite enjoyed that too, but I think the bleakness of the TV adaptations of the others I've seen have actually put me off.

I haven't finished The Mill on The Floss (and would in fact have to start it again cause I can't remember what happened), but I haven't given up on finishing it just yet, as I actually loved Middlemarch.

I can't get through any D.H. Lawrence or Thomas Hardy. It's the women in Hardy - cannot recognise anything about them.

I don't have the mental capacity to read the real classics these days, with the exception of Persuasion, which I read about once a year - it was my first Austen and will always be my favourite.

MrsDanversGlidesAgain · 05/09/2023 10:54

I just found it a proper slog. The language was very different to the 19th century works I had been used to up to then. I might appreciate it more now, as an 18 year old it was a bore

I do think that there's a lot of writers you grow into and can see more nuance and depth. Look at Middlemarch. Casaubon - old, pedantic, dry. Ladislaw - young, romantic, idealistic. Except from the perspective of middle age I damned well know who in the Ladislaw-Dorothea marriage would be running the household, juggling the bills, keeping within their income, entertaining the bores and dismissing the unsatisfactory servants and making sure the children were educated and minded their manners while the other pursued a political/literary career to the exclusion of everything else. But then I never saw Ladislaw's charm anyway.

MrsDanversGlidesAgain · 05/09/2023 10:58

You are right - he would have got bored of her in the end, but I think he would have always been kind to her, even if the adoration did wear off. He is a different class of rake to Willoughby or Wickham - so much more likeable. Mary too. And I think that is the big problem with reading MP with a modern mindset - we are far less shocked by the Crawfords than contemporary readers would have been

I agree about him always treating her with kindness and respect. And so true about reading MP with a modern mindset, esp Fanny's reaction to Crawford and Maria. Despite the overblown reaction (to the 21c mind) you do wonder if she was starting to feel kindly towards him and that's part of the shock.

RockaLock · 05/09/2023 11:01

I have never managed to make it all the way through Don Quixote, but I can't quite figure out what is putting me off.

Les Miserables and Gone with the Wind I only managed by skipping out all the descriptions of battles, which bore me to tears. That applies to any books with battles in, but those two stick out.

I'm sure I loved Anna Karenina when I first read it, but rereading it recently was a bit of a slog. I think my ability to concentrate has diminished as I've got older!

JaneJeffer · 05/09/2023 11:06

Catch 22
The Riddle of the Sands
The Hobbit

I love Wuthering Heights and Jane Austen

RaraRachael · 05/09/2023 11:07

All of them. I went to work in England and felt so ignorant because everybody would talk about the books they had read and I'd read none of them - just too much hard work and effort. I couldn't comment on anything as I don't know my Brontes from Jane Austen.