I tend to read a fair bit of Ludlum, Stephen King (yes, I know we hate him here), Clancy, Crichton, Robin Cook, etc. This is in between non-fiction reads, like Isaacson's biographies. Every now and then, I get the idea to go read one of those "books you're supposed to read". It might be some of the classics that you read in high school, or other famous books. Stuff like Hemingway, Faulkner, Updike, Salinger, etc. Or maybe older classics, like Bronte, Austen, etc. I do kinda like Poe.

And while I enjoy some of them, e.g., To Kill a Mockingbird and Lord of the Flies, I get done with others and think, "That kinda sucked. Why is this regarded as a 'one must read this to be well read?' What am I missing?" For example, I enjoyed the stories of Tom Sawyer much more than Huck Finn. Interpreting the accents in HF was tiring and tedious. And the story isn't as good. But Huck Finn is the great American novel. And I like a fair bit of Twain's other stuff. But I don't like that one.

(Spoiler alert, if anyone cares)

In high school, I had to read A Separate Peace by Knowles. And I remember hating it. Some intellectual tension between friends, and one falls out of a tree, breaks his leg and dies. 20 years later, I decided to read it again, hopefully with a more appreciative and mature eye to it. Nope. Totally sucked. If anything, I found the death from the fat embolism to be more interesting, since I work in medicine and I've seen a couple of deaths from emboli. But the bigger themes...totally lost or boring to me.

Catcher? A kid runs off and has teenage angst. Grapes? Oklahoma sucks...road trip...new place sucks. Old Man and the Sea? Old man catches huge fish, can't get it in the boat, sharks eat it on the way back to shore.

Gatsby? Grapes of Wrath? Sound and the Fury? Old Man and the Sea? Catcher in the Rye? I can barely slog through them. I finished them out of dogged determination, but didn't enjoy them. I've read commentaries on the themes involved. They just don't resonate with me.

Any thoughts from the book-reading ArfCrowd? There's got to be a reason why these have been regarded for decades or centuries as great books. I feel like if I could 'get' them, they'd probably be enriching to my life.

I've been on kinda the same track this year and I am surprised to say I agree with you quite a bit.

Some classics are great. I’ve read the entire Sherlock Holmes many times. And Edgar Rice Burroughs is very good.
But for the most part, I read modern authors. Some deceased.
David Baldacci
James Patterson(not his ghost writer crap)
Louis Llamour
Michael Crichton
Vince Flynn
Robert Ludlum
Early Stuart Woods (he has not written a good novel in decades)
And I’ll think of a few more later.

You should read more Dickens.

Back before memes and lolcats, one had to write a lot of words to make a simple concept accessible to the masses.  Those ended up being "books" and later "classics".

Sometimes the words themselves were good art, but many times it is just a simple concept encapsulated in lots of words in a language that couldn't otherwise express the concept and have it understood, by the masses.

So you get stuff like "The Black Pearl" that basically means "nature be scary, yo" or "A Turn of the Screw" means "wimmens's craycray" or "Lord of the Flies" = kids need fathers or "The Heart of Darkness" = Never get in a land war in Asia,  Etc.

I have read a lot of the classics.  Moby Dick was the worst one of the bunch.  It started out fine but the author mush have been high on opium and acid for the last 1/3 of the book.  

Thought it was just me. Some of the classics are terrible.

Sounds like we had the same reading list in high school, and similar reactions.  I also remember having great expectations for Great Expectations, and being underwhelmed by it.
The only one that made a real impression on me was 1984.

ETA and Brave New World

Read more. Clancy, Crichton, Cook each spell everything out to their reader. Not that those authors are not good, it's just that it's more chewing gum than meat. Most of the classics use symbolism in twined with the direct to get a deeper point across. Most of the classics that I thought were basic and plain when I was younger opened up to me later when I could better appreciate and understand what was actually happening within the story under the surface of words.

I agree that some of them are 'ugly reading' as I describe it. I don't consider myself 'well read'. Sometimes stories take three and four readings for me to feel like I understand it.

I've been reading Edgar Allan Poe again, some of his stuff is awesome...Hop Frog, The Imp of the Perverse, The Raven, The Conqueror Worm.  Some of his stuff seems dedicated Mr. Know-it-all type stuff (I'm smarter and better read than you).

His reference to circumlocution in the Imp makes me think some of it is intentional, but, overall, his work suffers for the obscure references he continually makes.

Nepenthe my butt. Pardon me while I mourn the death of some perfect young maiden.

I remember sitting in 12th Grade English and the teacher explaining the symbolism of a hat floating in the water. I didn't get that from the passage at all and asked her "How do you know that is what the author meant?" followed by "Is that honestly what you take away from that passage?" Her reply back to me was sort of a hesitant/blank look, then really just rephrased what she had said previously.

In the end I do not mind reading and then re-reading at another time books that I find enjoyable. On the other hand those that you have to make yourself read, if they aren't good they aren't good.

I consider myself fairly well read and have a willingness to read quite a variety of subject matter, eras and authors. But, at the same time I have to agree with the OP some of those book just suck.

I should add that part of my annoyance is that I just finished reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Not a classic book, but one that always shows up on best books lists for the late 20th Century. And to read the reviews, there are some people for whom this is a life changing book. I get that it's a kind of experimental, encyclopedic book and thought I'd try something different.

Wallace clearly has a really broad vocabulary and is well read. And some of the sentences and passages are really funny. But the book itself was very unsatisfying. Since I'm not a drug addict, I don't see it as that great. But to hear some reader's accounts, it's like the second coming and was thoroughly life changing for them. Like it's the literary version of The Shawshank Redemption film.

Practically, Wallace could've used an editor. Any editor. Alfred E. Neuman would've been better than the completely uncontrolled word salad that is Infinite Jest. Clearly, reading experimental writing is not for me. Probably won't be reading any Joyce or Pynchon.

Lord a' mighty.......if I had it to do over I'd just take an "F" rather than read Dickens.

Like having to read anything by Jane Austen...ugh.

I suspect that the intellectual set read a book by another intellectual and decide it's great literature because "He's one of US" so it MUST be a Great Book.
In order not to be thought an unwashed common person/dunce everyone OHH's and AHH's over it and it becomes a "Great Book" that everyone is expected to read in school because ....Great Book.

Stating that "The emperor has no clothes" that the book is drivel would get you proclaimed a common unwashed person/dunce who isn't intelligent enough to know Great Books and it gets inflicted on succeeding generations.
This is something like the New Wave Science Fiction writers of the 60's.
Their books were so weird that we suspected they were high on drugs.
Later on, we found out they WERE on drugs.
Today that drivel is considered great works of art.
Meanwhile the oh-so elite turn their noses up at Heinlein, Clarke, and the other REAL Masters as they turn their blue noses up at current military sci-fi writers like Weber, Flint, Drake, Ringo, and Corriea.

Those books that the oh-so elite book reviewers turn their noses up at are usually the really good reads that real people actually enjoy.

read The Divine Comedy and get back to us.

William Faulkner. Oh man. I tried reading The Sound and the Fury last year. Lasted about ten pages.

Yeah a lot of the so-called classics are horrible.  I think some of it has to do with a different life experience, a different society.  But a lot of it has to do with the people who declared them classics being in the right place at the right time.

I remember that it was an option to reading during 11th or 12th grade. I read a summary and description and did a hard NOPE on that. I'm not really a fan of books with unreliable narrators. Maybe I'm just to slow to 'get' it. I can read a hard book if it's somehow enjoyable and there's a lot of ways to enjoy it. If it's beating you over the head the entire time while trying to figure out some idiotic, stream of consciousness drivel, that's not enjoyable.
I do agree that when I have a better understanding for the time and context in which a book was written, it's more enjoyable. Frankenstein and Dracula are both more fun to read when you understand the social mores and anxieties of Victorian England.

Junior High and High school literature ruined the classics for me.  Everything I was forced to read ended up sucking.   I have not read any Classics since college and probably never will. I never found one I liked or a classic author that was any good.

I had a college English professor who loved Faulkner and Melville.  Our whole quarter was nothing more than reading Faulker stories from a book we had to buy and then writing papers on them.  Some of the short stories weren't bad.

I've tried to read a lot of the 18th and 19th century authors over the years.  I've come to realize that the style and language doesn't always translate well into the style and language we use today.  That makes them very hard for us to read.  I'll stick with watching the move adaptations!

Poe, Mark Twain and Stephen Crane weren't that bad to read, though.

I really have to wonder if people actually read Ulysses by Joyce.




I totally agree. Johnathan Edwards comes to mind.

Classics were written before radio and TV and people who chose to read them were after a different experience than people today.

Atlas Shrugged.

Because they are shit, ergo they suck. But the liberal left academia has proclaimed them to be "national treasures" and "works of art." You want to reduce depression, anger and suicidal tendencies in teenagers? Stop forcing them to read pure, unadulterated horseshit like Catcher in the Rye.

We've become a brain dead society with the collective IQ of a dunce. Words have meanings, and complex ideas require complex writing. But the average American reads at the writing level of USA Today, which is why that rag was popular for so long.

Read it and liked it.

Now somebody here please explain What Is So Fantastic About Gravity's Rainbow
All I ever got from the start of the book was banana this, banana that, banana Everything Else.

Re read On The Beach, It'll make the same impression it did 45 years ago.

One thing that might help is to research which writers were paid by the word.  Some of the classics are overwhelmingly verbose.  That can at times be attributed to clarity of an idea for someone who doesn’t have a reference point.   Describing a carriage ride in London may have never been an experience that someone could relate to...so the author uses the words to create a picture.  

In our world, that level of description is overboard and frequently unnecessary.  

Some classics to look at....

Frankenstein
Count of Monte Christo
Les Miserables (abridged version may work better for you)
Treasure Island
Three Musketeers
Call of the wild
Ivanhoe
Kim
Le Morte d’Arthur
King Solomon’s mine
20,000 leagues under the sea


Rhino

You just explained some of Robert Weber's Honorverse books.

I swear that I can read a paragraph on one page, skip the bulk of what's written on rest, continue on the Next page and not miss anything.
I think I can almost read a paragraph, skip two or three pages and STILL not miss anything of note.
He could cut a quarter to a third of what he writes and still be excessively verbose.

Yes, many of these books are better understood and better reading when you understand the times they were written in.  Though there are some that I just do not like.


I did like Dracula because I know alot about the 19th century including customs, etc.

Yes. unless you have read up on 19th century norms and customs they can be hard to read or enjoy.  But if you do have some knowledge of 18-19th century norms then they became easier to read and understand.

I think that "classic" books are like anything else in that some people will pretend to like them for peer group status points. Just as many call shit they don't like or understand bad and assert that "real people" only like certain kinds of books.

this, good god

I couldn't even get thru the cliff notes of Little Women in high school ( a million years ago).  Holy fuck

a fucking Karen before there were karen's

AWFUL

so, you've read Alexander Dumas?????

I mean really the stories are good, but it's like "good god man, get an editor"

You can read something at one period in your life, then re-read it sometime later and have a whole different take on that book.

I rushed through some books just to pass classes, but read them later on my own time with nothing to gain, and ended up adding those works to my list of favorites.

Care to give a few examples. Most of the ones I pushed through to finish a class are not ones that I've enjoyed.

Anna Karenina is the only book ive ever physically thrown across the room.

So there you go.

97.8% of the people proclaiming the virtues of that book never read it.

Anthem and The Fountainhead are much better intros to Ayn Rand

Ambrose Bierce.   Some of his stuff is awesome.

Agree, about 50% of the classics are terrible.

Moby Dick was also the worst for me.

On the Beach is one of my favorite books of all time.

I think your estimate might be low.

Grapes of Wrath was an FDR inspired book where government was good and progressives will save you message.

Some the classics are bad....

but keep in mind a lot of modern "Award Winners" are horrible also...

It's scary that so many who have read it think it's a great book.

I have always been torn about Hemingway......I love reading his stuff, especially the Nick Adams short stories. But he is a terrible writer.