Classics you couldn't finish

[Tambatamba]

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

Mary Crawford is the heroine of Mansfield Park

I love Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy but (and this is extremely feeble, I know) the Russian names of characters, so unfamiliar to English ears, are an obstacle for me. It takes so much longer to achieve a settled sense of the cast of characters.

Its partly because the names are difficult ro remember, but also because a name that is a bit of a mouthful (for an English reader), and one that may be transliterated using a range of different spellings, can't quite function as a stand-in for the character himself or herself.

I mean, Darcy is Darcy. I see and feel the word alongside his dark and chilly good looks etc. He is his name in my mind's eye. But, other than one or two of the most iconic Russian characters, I can't feel Russian characters via their names so it is harder to bring them to life. Which in turn makes it harder for the novels to come to life.

I love Crime and Punishment, and almost everything by Tolstoy (despite him being a moralistic little bleeder) but beyond that I haven't succeeded.

Wuthering Heights and Lord of the Rings.

I've tried several times to get into them, but it just doesn't click for me.

Reading Dickens is like wading through treacle. He's a great storyteller, but not a great writer.

😂😂😂

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

My first JA was Mansfield Park for A level - put me off JA for another 20 years or so. It's the only one of hers I haven't read multiple times.

Also couldn't wade through Another 100 years of Solitude and the Old Man and the Sea. Very happy to read Dickens, Tolkien and I love Trollope.

I have An 'Unfinished' Collection on my Kindle which has The Princess Bride by William Goldman (what a load of cobblers and I l-urve fantasy).

I liked Middlemarch so thought I'd try Mill on the Floss. Didn't get far...

That is 👌🏼.

Crime and Punishment. I knew it wasn't going to be light reading but it was just too depressing.

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

You could say a lot of P&P is ironic - that the father who has everyone's sympathy is the one imperilling his daughters' future, while the irritating mother is the one doing her best to get them a secure future, even if it does mean marriage to someone they don't like, such as Mr Collins.

I was coming to post “Les Miserables because I can’t make it through the 70-odd pages about the Battle of Waterloo”! I’ve always been hesitant to skip it in case I missed some crucial piece of information.
The Name of The Rose is much easier to read if you tune out some of the lengthier classical bits.
On The Road by Jack Kerouac is the most misogynistic self- lionising rubbish, I hate it.
I have read WH twice, once at 19 and once at 40- I loved it at 19 but couldn’t finish it at 40. You can tell that EB didn’t have much experience of affairs of the heart, it’s very feverish.

Oh, yes, of course! How could I forget Moby Dick? Or, rather, how could anyone not forget it? Joseph Condrad famously summed it up as 'a rather strained symphony, on the subject of whaling', which sounds about right.

I started it but couldn't finish it. However, I very much enjoyed an audio book of it on Spotify (which I also didn't finish).

I do think its purple passages are very very enjoyable, but they get in the way of the nnovel a bit.

Adam Bede. First year of uni, it was so very tedious. It was very long and absolutely nothing happened, "Hetty the pretty buttermaker" basically made butter and tried to be wooed by the "Strong Adam"_ I always pictured Gaston from Beauty and the beast... Anyway end of the year many of that class destroyed the damned book.

I think that irony is in abeyance to an extent in Mansfield Park, where the heroine is a morally-unimpeachable mousy dullard, the hero is dutiful and sensible (at best!’, the two ‘bad’ characters, Henry and Mary Crawford, are by far the most charismatic, and the comedy comes from ghastly Aunt Norris and the practically-comatose and dim Lady Bertram. I still love it for the set pieces like the visit to Sotherton, the home theatre, Fanny’s visit to Portsmouth, her ‘coming out’ ball, but in JA’s other novels the heroine gets to be witty and playful as well as broadly right, once she’s corrected her ‘prejudice’ or snobbery or over-romanticism.

Joan Aiken wrote a good, short sequel called Mansfield Revisited, where the Crawfords are rehabilitated as good eggs (Henry wasn’t involved in Maria’s affair, Mary had really loved Edmund), Fanny and Edmund are sent off to Antigua, and Fanny’s livelier sister Susan is the heroine.

I love Middlemarch! Studied it for A level and have re read it several times since. Definitely worth persisting!

The trick to reading Dickens is to spot and skip over most of the descriptive passages. They were surely written to be performed, so if you want those listen to a good reader like Jarvis. Or watch an adaptation with good production values. If Dickens had been born in the 20th or 21st century he'd surely have been writing for the screen.

It occurs to me that apart from his public serialised performances, there would have been a lot more reading aloud in homes in the past, with limited other entertainment, poor lighting etc so listening to audio books could perhaps be viewed as quite authentic albeit better quality than getting whoever had the best eyesight to do it.

I have read WH twice, once at 19 and once at 40- I loved it at 19 but couldn’t finish it at 40. You can tell that EB didn’t have much experience of affairs of the heart, it’s very feverish.

Only twice.

Feverish . . .

Only twice

For anyone put off by the length of War & Peace, you can skip the military sections in their entirety without missing anything. It's a better read without them IMO (sorry, Tolstoy), even though I do like military history.

Crime & Punishment - got through it but I must be missing something. I just couldn't care less about Raskolnikov's moral anguish and I found his lack of insight (even for his era) into his own misogyny and snobbishness disturbing. Top tip - if you don't want to be wracked with guilt about a murder, don't murder someone for no reason.

The Brothers Karamazov is a good 300 page novel, trapped in an 800 page book. I did like The Idiot, though.

Surprising it wasn't moor..

Proust. Just impossible to read. It really is like drowning.

The Divine Comedy. Nope, sorry, not for me. I just about made it to the end of the Inferno.

Portnoy's Complaint. Vile book with the most loathsome central character in all literature. Isn't funny either.

I also struggled with Shakespeare's comedies. I have read all the plays (it's my big boast), but Shakespeare isn't funny. I don't care what people like Harold Bloom say, comedy doesn't age well. Give me P. G. Wodehouse or Douglas Adams or Evelyn Waugh any day.

Howard's End. I'm sorry to say this, because A Room with a View is my favourite film. I also like Forster's other stuff. But I found HE slow and dull. Aldous Huxley, Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf cover similar territory, and do it more enjoyably. Maybe I wasn't in the right place when I read it.

Oh and Samuel Beckett. Ugghhh...we get it Sam, life's horrible and meaningless. You already said that in your last play, and the one before that, and the one before that.

I love hearing people's opinions on the classics. It's so interesting.

There's something about Tolkien that repels me, and I can't put my finger on it. Harold Bloom said LOTRs reads like The Book of Mormon! Yet he does create astonishingly vivid characters. Get a good audiobook and the effect can be overwhelming. Tom Bombadil, the Ents and Gollum are astonishing, and a good reader really brings them alive. He also has a profound sense of evil – the nature of evil, I mean.

I also have mixed feelings about Dickens. I do prefer him to Tolkien though. At his best, he really is a genius. The scene in which David sees his mother for the last time, or Joe Gargery has to visit Miss Havisham, but can't look her in the face, are superb. Like Shakespeare and Chaucer he also packs his writing with energy. Harold Bloom said we read Dickens for the vivid life – the rush and gusto. Very few writers have that gift. He also make you feel that life is worth living, and that human beings are worth caring about. Another odd thing about Dickens is that he's the only writer who makes me cry. I hate mawkishness, and find 99% of films sickening (I burst out laughing at the end of Titanic). Yet Dickens has me in floods.

Another odd thing about Dickens is that he's the only writer who makes me cry. I hate mawkishness, and find 99% of films sickening (I burst out laughing at the end of Titanic). Yet Dickens has me in floods.

There have been a few threads over the years on 'bits in books you can't read aloud without blubbering'. Top of my list - total failure on my part, I physically couldn't do it - is the scene in David Copperfield where Dora is expiring 'offscreen' but her daft little dog dies. It was really annoying, it's sheer emotional manipulation of course!

I finished all of these but I'm not entirely sure why I bothered, all of them were a slog or depressing:

Gulliver's Travels
Lord of the Rings
Jude the Obscure
Mrs Dalloway
Wives and Daughters (this was more enjoyable than the others but I didn't realise it was actually unfinished until I reached the end)

I can't read anything he wrote about Dora without having to brush away a tear trickle of vomit from my eye mouth.