Thank heavens for Cliff and Monarch notes. A number of the above referenced books were ones I never would have gotten through without them.
Crime and Punishment…I needed the Cliff notes for the family tree! Very confusing!
“The Sun Also Rises” by (of course) Ernest Hemingway. I read it before traveling to Pamplona. It’s a group of bored people drinking and arguing pointlessly. There are long pages of a fishing trip in the Pyrenees that have no connection to anything. It’s hard to believe that this book put Pamplona on the map so to speak.
I once felt a need or something to read a number of Dostoyevsky novels. Somehow, their plots have blurred in my mind, they are all the same, right down to the precocious high school student with consumption, all of whom seem to have the same name.
Just as with a number of Dickens and some parts of Gaskell novels, finding out that they wrote these novels in instalments, making money with each new chapter, explains a lot I find.
Speaking of adaptions… Call of the Wild. I don’t know if it counts as a “classic” but we read it during an intro to American Studies course that I was supposed to GSI. I didn’t think much of it other than it was racist.
Then I was shocked to see Disney was producing it. I have no interest in watching it but I’m curious as to how they made the ending Disney friendly.
Anything by Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.
I love Gone With the Wind and Jane Eyre, have read both numerous times though never can sit through either movie.
The only college English class I took outside of the required ones was a Moby Dick class. I took it purposely to read Moby Dick, I wanted to read it and knew I never would without the motivation of a class. I am glad I read and and never picked it up again.
When I was in college and grad school I picked a different author and read several works by that author each summer. Faulkner, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Dickens. There are none I would read again, though Hemingway may come the closest.
These days I can not concetrate on reading like I used to. I don’t read classics on a regular basis any more. I primarly read the free Amazon prime books now. Though, I did just re-read Forever Amber. Amazon calls it a classic, though in my mind it is not in the same league as the “classic” classics.
Shakespeare is one I never wanted to read. I never have cared for poetry nor plays.
My best friend from high school’s favorite book is 100 Years of Solitude, I’ve tried to read it a number of times. It’s so boring!
I loathe Catcher in the Rye, I went to boarding school, but that doesn’t mean I want to read about a whiner.
Loved Moby Dick, I only signed up for it though, because I’d had the teacher previously and knew she was wonderful.
I think I may be getting more impatient though, I’ve thought lots of books would have been better with some serious editing. (The last Harry Potter being a prime example.) I loved Middlemarch as a teen, but reading it now am finding it slow going.
I’ve never managed to finish a novel by Faulkner.
When we’d been living in Germany for a while and I no longer felt obliged to read German novels for practice I went on a spate of Henry James, I read four or five them, but then I got to The Amabassadors which had a sentence that was four pages long. And I put it down and never picked it back up.
Gosh, I only get to name a few??? From High School:
*Catcher in the Rye! *
I had to write a report on it, my perspective on it, and then, orally present it to the teacher. She couldn’t understand why I didn’t like it. I also told her that it was my first exposure to obscene language in print, which was not permitted in my house! If my parents knew what I was reading, they would have burned the book!
Moby Dick 'nuff said.
Walden- I’m no naturalist but I did have a scout troop and taught the basics about respecting nature and leaving everything better, but Thoreau? No words! My teacher loved him! OMG-awful! Spoiled, rich, and lazy author. If I hear another word on Henry David Thoreau . . . vomit.
The Trial Franz Kafka
- Crime and Punishment* dead Dostoyevski
I liked The Iliad, The Odyssey. Loved To Kill a Mockingbird, Diary of Ann Frank and Twain, Dickens, anything Austen, and Shakespeare (loved The Taming of the Shrew!!).
(Our sophomore teacher loved Shakespeare, and read it aloud while acting it so that we could understand it. Excellent theater for a high school class!)
Apocalypse Now is the only movie I ever walked out of. I was with a date so I couldn’t leave so spent most of the movie in the restroom with another woman who also hated it.
I much prefer light reading nowadays. Anything by Tess Gerritsen catches my attention from the first page and I never figure out who did it. She has quite an imagination.
Heh, I see I am far from alone in my inability to deal with Crime and Punishment. In high school, I skipped about 300 pages out of the middle. One and only time I ever actually used Cliffs Notes.
Other books from my school days, I found really depended on the teacher. Going in, I dreaded Jude the Obscure but wound up loving it because of the discussions we had in class. Had the same teacher for Shakespeare and changed my whole perspective - Coriolanus was my favorite.
Just about all of my favorite books & authors have been mentioned in this thread.
P.S. Thank God that Lewis Grizzard never wrote a classic novel.
Charles Dickins was always a tough read for me. Really struggled with him. Had to read several of them in High School. Last time I picked one up…
I failed Freshman English by not reading this for my 8:30a class. That didn’t work for a 17 y.o. with no parental supervision…
Did not finish:
Kim
Lord Jim
The Canterbury Tales
Skipped the middle to get to the end:
Moby Dick
Crime and Punishment
The Idiot
Finished but hated:
Jane Eyre
Wuthering Heights
Animal Farm
Romeo and Juliet
The Fountainhead was required reading in college. Although parts of it were a struggle to get through, I liked it.
Kim? I remember that book being totally fun! Though all I remember now was Kim being prepared to be a spy by memorizing a tray full of stuff and knowing what was missing.
I read Crime and Punishment while I was in Europe doing research for my senior thesis, I remember thinking that my next book was going to be cheery. I was in a basement very spartan bed and breakfast in London with a proprietor that seemed potentially creepy, though nothing bad happened.
^ @mathmom Perhaps, I should give Kim another try. I started reading it when I was 11 or 12 because I loved Kipling’s short stories. I never got past the first 50 pages if that.
For me, reading The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper was sheer agony. I had to read it for an American Lit course in college.
Great movie though!
I have always been a voracious reader (even had my library privileges cut off in fourth grade because I was secretly reading books during class) but have never made it through Moby Dick or Crime and Punishment and never enjoyed anything by Steinbeck or Hemingway. There’s probably some common thread but I am not sure what it is. My daughter had to read Of Mice and Men last year for class - she liked it and I reconfirmed that I do not. I would kind of like to like Hemingway - I’ve been to his homes in Cuba and Key West and can feel that he had flair - but it seems destined not to be.