Which books or authors do you know you *ought* to like, but just can't?

[Cosmosis]

I find both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights almost unreadable, and yet I know many people who love them both. It's not a Bronte thing I don't think, as I loved Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Also, other than Hard Times and Great Expectations, I really can't read Dickens.

Hate Martin Amis too but can't agree on Catch 22, Dickens, Toni Morrison, 100 years of Solitude, Austen or Rushdie.

Found Famished Road hard going but enjoyed it in the end.

Hemingway

I agree with Lord Of The Rings.

Oh I love love love Austen.

LOL at Catch22. I've not tried it, it's sitting on our bookshelf, but after DH's slating of it I'm not in a hurry to try!

Catcher in the Rye I need to re-read as I was a teenager when I read it.

Swanriver, I liked The Road. Although having just watched No Country For Old Men, I'm not rushing to read that one.

I find this happens..

I love one Paul Auster (New York Trilogy) but can't stand the others.

Love José Saramago Blindness but couldn't get through Seeing Double.

Loved Don DeLillo White Noise, but had to put down Underworld.

Other than that, found it hard to get through Heart of Darkness or to read any Annie E. Proulx.

Disliked magic realism so much that I now refuse to open book if blurb uses any of following words: "spellbinding", "enchanting" or, most damning of all, "dreamlike" - bleurgh, bleurgh, bleurgh.

Who are all these people who don't like Jane Austen or Emily Bronte? You better not have a go at George Eliot .

No, Middlemarch marvellous, obviously. But Wuthering Heights is rubbish, actually. All that Sturm und Drang.Great when you're 17; when you're 43, not so much.

Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (sp?). And Lord of the Rings, too. It's the names- they don't stay in my head so I keep having to go back to the beginning to check who's who.....

Life's just too short.

anything by Salman Rushdie

Catch 22 is a fantastic book

See I luuuurve the Sturm und Drang but then, I was about 17 the first time I read it .

PlumpRump, I have lost count of the number of times I have started war and peace and given up after checking the family tree thing for the umpteenth time!

Another vote here for Catch 22.

I HATE HATE HATE not finishing a book so sometimes I have to give myself a talking to and ask if I think I am really less able to read something than millions of other people. Usually works to a certain extent but usually don't really enjoy the book, just feel I am reading it because I ought to.

Still did not finish Catch 22...

I've never managed to finish Catch 22 either

Or Anna Karenina - I keep trying to and then getting bogged down in all the stuff about peasant farming methods

And I second the no vote on magical realism - hate hate hate it, is a big pile of poo

Love Catch 22!

However I cannot abide Thomas Hardy. I feel I should read his books, but I've not finished one yet I just don't like the stories or the way they are written.

you really have to stick with Catch 22

it seems all disjointed to start with, but everything falls into place by the end

Lowering the brow a bit...

If I had a pound for everyone who has recommended that I read those Ladies No 1 Detective Agency books I'd have a fair bit of change in my pocket. Everyone reads them and thinks of me and assures me that I'll LOVE them. They're probably right but I just can't read more than 5 pages in. Dreadful. Can't stand them.

Oh I agree on Hardy, and Hemingway and also Martin Amis.

Also Hanif Kureishi, Hemingway, Salinger (I think you need to read JD when a teenager to 'get' it)

what is about catch 22?

i actually wuite liked it, found it pretty amusing, but have h=never got to the end.
i think every chapter 'feels' the same, the style doesn't alter at all, so i just stopped reading it, got sidetracked, then didn't get back into it.

i could say the asme about catcher in the rye & on the road as well.

those damn, modern americans,

but i did finish both of those quite easily

i get quite annoyed with people confusing loooooong okish books with greatness though, eg. LOTR - too easy just to get lost midway. would have been so much better if the publisher just said 'we're cutting out half'

womblingalong, have you ever read 'De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period' (short story by JD Salinger)? It makes me howl with laughter.

So agree about Joyce Carol Oates. She's so very prolific, and they're all so very long and so very not-really-much-good, aren't they?

Read all of Hardy when I was younger but they are pretty much all onegirlthreemenonlyoneofwhomisanygoodmuchtragedythereforeensues.

I can't bear Martin Amis either, I think he is wildly overrated and far too impressed with himself. It all feels a bit 'look at me and my incredible intelligence'.

Didn't finish Catch 22 either, so pleased I'm not the only one! I enjoyed what I read, but I lost momentum after a long break from it.

Also detest magical realism.

I thought 'The Alchemist' was a load of cod philosophy.

Oi - step away from the Austen!

For me the one book I just can't get, that everybody tells me is wonderful is 'Middlemarch' - it isn't.

Dickens

Ian McEwan

Anything hailed as 'a fine new voice in literary fiction' or somesuch drivel -

'A Quiet Belief In Angels' and 'Kevin' spring to mind.

'Poisonwood Bible'

Joyce, obviously.

Jane Eyre - the second half is bloody brilliant; the first half is excrutiatingly dull.

Agree about Austen Janeite, tis sacrilege no less and also with whoever mentioned Tolstoy, like wading through treacle for me

I think I was lucky with Jane Eyre as we read it for English at school at 14/15 and it hooked me, it's probably more interesting to read about the grim Lowood school when you're a child yourself..

Having read all this thread I'm now knocking Amis off my 'to read' list

Little Dorrit - impenetrable language. Though I was trying to read it while in hospital with appendicitis.

The Hobbit and Lord Of The Rings - life is too short. More suited to trainspotters and anyone else turned on by boring detail.

Couldn't read Wuthering Heights either

The other one is The Women's Room by Marylin French. Was given it in my early 20s, tried to read it - gave up and gave the book away. Then, in my 30s thought maybe I was too young to appreciate it, so I bought the book again, tried to read it, failed again. It's still on my bookshelf now, gathering dust.

(loved Jane Eyre and Catch 22 though).