Well, I do love Middlemarch (favorite book of all time), and have read Moby Dick several times, and written about it professionally and academically, because so much going on in it (whale story really is just the plot, not the point.)
But, in keeping with this thread, I did not really like Wuthering Heights, because even forty years ago, it was clear what an abuser Heathcliffe was. Also not a big David Copperfield fan, though I love Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend. Oh, didn’t much like Vanity Fair.
Really despised Ethan Frome when I read it in HS. Just the worst. Frigging red pickle dish, that’s all I remember from it. That and the unrelenting bleakness.
Some I read in the past when I had more brain power (before internet times) which I’ll probably never read again, but appreciated at the time: Most Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, James.
@Massmomm , Nonono! I can’t fathom how anyone could hate Vanity Fair. I was actually going to say earlier that it’s my favorite novel of all time, until I remembered we are supposed to talk about a classic we couldn’t finish. Haha!
Another classic I couldn’t finish: To the Lighthouse. But I loved Orlando.
Moby Dick. I literally only read the part that I needed to in order to do an oral presentation for my junior year English class. The other one I hated was Frankenstein. I still remember my 15 year old mind wincing as he ran (and he ran a lot) through the forests of Germany and thinking, “This is so not like Mel Brooks”…haha.
I loved, loved, loved Tale of Two Cities, The Canterbury Tales and Walden.
As an aside: my favorite book memory in HS was during my junior year we needed to do a project where we picked an American author and read all of his/her books (or most if too many), then did a 30 page paper comparing/contrasting the author, style, etc. It took the whole year. It was quite the endeavor.
My boyfriend at the time chose James Michener. I remember thinking, “Why would you ever do that to yourself?”. I, on the other hand, chose James Thurber. Clearly you can see who understood the path of least resistance better. Hahahaha.
Re: historical context
I suppose that’s the main reason I couldn’t get into Moby Dick.
Everything about the whaling industry was so foreign to a midwestern kid who’d never even seen the ocean. Who cares about the anatomy of whales, the operation of old sailing ships, and the tools of a now-extinct trade? Having to look up so many unfamiliar words got old fast.
Another book I never finished: Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset. I was on a binge and had just read Gunnar’s Daughter and the whole Master of Hestviken series. I can’t really explain what happened except that it was winter and I just couldn’t stand the cold any more! Nothing to do with the quality of the book. Maybe I’ll try it again in the summer.
Sense and Sensibility–I tried to start reading it back in my early 20s and gave up. But the movie with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet is one of my absolute favorites. I pretty much have it memorized. Never had the urge to go back to the book. How could it possibly be as good as the movie??
kjs–we had a similar project when I was in high school. My author was Kurt Vonnegut. The teacher didn’t believe I’d read all his books, but I really had. (He had a lot fewer books back then…)
My mother’s favorite authors are Tolstoy and Dostoevsky among others. Once I started reading for pleasure, she would always urge me to read their books. I started with *Crime and Punishment/i, and moved on to *The Idiot/i. I waited a few years before I tackled Anna Karenina which may have helped because I didn’t hate the book just the physical form of it (hard bound collector’s edition). I also read The Death of Ivan Ilyich which wasn’t terrible.
But clearly, the apple didn’t fall anywhere near the tree, lol.
Interesting that so many people say they disliked *Great Expectations/i and Vanity Fair. VF is a slog but I still enjoyed reading it.
A book that I forgot to include in the list of books I finished but hated The Picture of Dorian Gray.
And for all the Faulkner haters, I do love his most famous quote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Always struck me as such a Southern thing to say.
Wow! What a profoundly depressing thread this is for someone who loves literature! There’s hardly a book mentioned here that I don’t really cherish. (Except for Ayn Rand, but that’s not anyone’s idea of classic literature.) When I was a boy, I loved James Fennimore Cooper and the Mark Twain takedown of him.
This reminds me a little of a scene I love in the novel that put David Lodge on the map, Changing Places. The Berkeley English Department is drinking and socializing together, and they decide to play a game: name a book you haven’t read, and you get points for everyone in the room who has read it. You win by not having read what everyone has read. A super-competitive junior faculty member on the verge of tenure claims (dubiously) never to have read Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, so he wins . . . and is denied tenure the next day, because no one can see granting tenure to someone who has never read Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet.
Anyway, Lindagaf and I share something: As a sophomore in college, I threw my copy of To The Lighthouse out the window of my college library one night. It was short, but just soooo boring and inconsequential! It’s not that I demanded that my reading be action movies, either – I had already read all of A la recherche du temps perdu in French, and I was a fan of Henry James. A few months later, I read Erich Auerbach’s essay on Proust and Woolf, which ends with a beautiful analysis of To The Lighthouse and presents it as more or less the culmination of 25 centuries of Western literature. I felt pretty bad about having hated it so much. But I didn’t go back and read it again, or try ever to read Mrs. Dalloway.
I have never attempted Infinite Jest or anything else by David Foster Wallace. Once upon a time I meant to, but I didn’t. Now I’m not reading Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Faulkner respected his readers. Didn’t feel the need to spoon-feed them or to just narrate a story. William Faulkner wanted readers to use the material to form his or her own understanding of his work.
Critics have stated: Whereas all great writers deserve a second reading, Faulkner requires it.
P.S. It might help readers to better understand William Faulkner’s works if the reader imagined himself or herself as an observer present in the scene.
To the reader who could not name a single work by William Faulkner, here is a partial list:
I used to teach Management Communication to MBA students. One of the key things I taught them about communicating is that it’s both the responsibility of the sender of the message and of the receiver of the message to be understood. If someone’s communications are often misunderstood, it is probably the fault of the sender of the message.
Great Literature a la Faulkner isn’t like business communication, but if people don’t understand his work, they won’t read his work. Isn’t it a goal of an author to be read??
A common misunderstanding of Faulkner’s works is that it was Southern or required a Southern perspective in order to be fully appreciated.
William Faulkner was more of an artist than a writer–at least by traditional standards.
P.S. My best guess is that communication was not a primary goal of William Faulkner–again, at least not in the traditional sense.
In my opinion, Faulkner did not create completed stories, he created characters and showed their perspectives allowing the reader to participate by interpreting the ongoings and creating his or her own understanding of his (Faulkner’s) creation.
Although not easy for most to see, both Mark Twain & William Faulkner understood human beings and human nature.
But, take my observations with a grain of salt as I love everything written by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekov, Faulkner, Lewis Grizzard, and I read, and thoroughly enjoyed, The Catcher In The Rye multiple times.
P.S. In keeping with the spirit of this thread, I use books written by Shakespeare as doorstops–although I do treasure his Cliffs Notes versions–which are kept on the bookshelves.
And I read both the New York Times & the Wall Street Journal with equal respect & mistrust.
All great art can be difficult, especially when you first encounter it. And many great artists don’t necessarily want to be understood by the masses. I’m sure Faulkner could have written simply - or Picasso drawn more realistically/illustratively. That’s not their goal.
I know you are saying that literature and business communication are not the same, but I think the difference can’t be exaggerated. Literary writers are not communicating a message (I mean, sure, there’s messages aplenty), but literary writing is more about HOW it’s written, not the WHAT. So if you want to read to find out whodunnit, that’s great. I like those books, too. But if you’re reading because you like, or love, HOW the writer tells the story, then sometimes it takes more work on the reader’s part to understand. But if it’s work you love, then yay! It’s worth doing. But if you don’t love it, there’s no sense in “getting” the message, because that’s probably not the primary aim of the writer.