For fun: Your Dread "Classic"

"Great Expectations." Holy Snore Fest, Batman!

Wuthering Heights for me. The neurosis of the writer is written into every line. I hate it.

And don't even get me started on Gone with the Wind.....

Huckleberry Finn.

Shudder.

Novels by Thomas Hardy or Henry James

Great Gatsby, Great Expectations (I had them, the book failed to meet them), and Frankenstein are on the top of my list.

Anything by Hemingway or Steinbeck.

And Rabbit, Run. I'd heard for years how brilliant it was, then I read it and it was just a bunch of useless morons who really needed to wake up, get a few backbones among them, and get lives. Gawd, what a waste of words. I actually did read the whole thing, just hoping something would actually happen...

Pagey's_Girl said:

Anything by Hemingway or Steinbeck.

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Pagey's_Girl makes Jo cry.

I honestly can't think of one. Every classic I've read I've liked. Faulkner's comes closest to ones I dislike. I don't understand many passages, which does frustrate me, though overall I still appreciate his books.

The Red Badge of Courage: if I had known the phrase "Grow a pair, son!" at age 10, I would have shouted it as I flung this book against the wall.

Boccaccio's Decameron: Pining away over your boyfriend's head that you have concealed in a pot of basil=FAIL. So sayeth I.

I can't stand Pride & Prejudice

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Okay, STEP OUTSIDE. I'm Austen's beeyotch.

Heart of Darkness is my dreaded classic. Mistah Kurtz, this book sucks.

The Mayor of Casterbridge...burn!!!!!

Oh, I've got one. My English teacher when I was a sophomore got reeeally sick and was out for like 3 weeks. In the meantime he told the sub to read Robinson Crusoe with us. It was not popular. Noooot popular at all. The first day he came back in, he said "I hear you guys aren't thrilled with this." We all said in unison, "NO!" And he said, "Well then, we'll read something else!" The peasants rejoiced.

To this day I wonder if he assigned that book solely so we'd be happy when he came back.

I have many, but this year there were two in particular that trump the rest. As already mentioned, Heart of Darkness. The most dreadful thing I've ever read. We went from 1984 and Brave New World to the combo of Lord of the Flies and Heart of Darkness. When she said it was a novella, I didn't think it'd be that bad, and I thought that I'd enjoy it, since I enjoyed Lord of the Flies, what with the exact same basis, more or less. Lord, was I wrong. Not a single person in my class had a positive thing to say about it. In my speech on The Screwtape Letters, to help calm my nerves I made a little crack about Heart of Darkness being a novella, but feeling more like a novel with the dreadful writing and how it dragged on, and got a nice laugh in response.

Right below that, originally number one, is Tess of the D'Urbervilles. I stopped halfway through when I was reading it during the summer as required reading for AP English and read the SparkNotes for the rest of it. We had to write summaries of all the chapters to turn in on the first day and I took the SparkNotes and put them in my own words. Teacher didn't deduct any points or make any sign that she noticed, even with some names whited out, because of our lack of colored ink and the names being hyperlinks when I copied and pasted before reworking them in my own words, among various other problems.

Oddly, I actually suffered through the entirety of Heart of Darkness, if I remember correctly, but not Tess of the D'Urbervilles. I guess my will power was a lot stronger after Tess tested it.

The absolute worst that I remember everybody in class, without fear of hyperbole or exaggeration, hated with the passion of 10,000 burning nuns was Moby Dick. We had at least three copies of the Cliffs Notes circulating around 20 students.

In eighth grade, we read The Yearling and that's about all I remember about the book.

I kept trying to stab myself to death with my copy of Heart of Darkness.

Anything Tolkein. Lord, I thought Frank Herbert got verbose. (I love the original Dune trilogy, FWIW.)

I've never managed to read any of Trollope's novels; I was supposed to read Barchester Towers, and another one, whose title I've forgotten, for my novel exam, and tried and tried and tried, but couldn't finish.

TerzaRima said:

Okay, STEP OUTSIDE. I'm Austen's beeyotch.

Heart of Darkness is my dreaded classic. Mistah Kurtz, this book sucks.

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I managed to avoid reading it for years.

Then I had to teach it . . .

I'm tellin' ya, all the good stuff is before 1832, and most of it is before 1700.

Don Quixote. About seven thousand pages of mocking the afflicted. And For Whom the Bell Tolls, which has the most Mary Sue-ish MC in the history of literature

The Scarlet Letter is my least favorite classic. Followed by Walden. Or maybe those two tie...ask me again tomorrow.

Priene said:

Don Quixote. About seven thousand pages of mocking the afflicted. And For Whom the Bell Tolls, which has the most Mary Sue-ish MC in the history of literature

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LOL @ Mary Sue...his name is Robert Jordan...do you think that spurred Jordan to his writing career?

Pride and Prejudice I respect that it's well written, but I can't respect that the story is so dull. To me, Jane Austen wasn't a storyteller--just a fabulous writer. The theme was so frivolous; the characters dull and uninteresting. I couldn't relate to any of them. Life is just too fast paced for me to to mull things over in my brain about the frivolities between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy.

The Scarlet Letter was another classic I loathed. The plot summary is very misleading. It presents this fabulous plot, but the execution was boring and a waste of time for me. I loved the movie. I am not afraid to stand up and say that. I liked that the movie revealed what happened before Hester Prynne was put in jail. If Hawthorne had written the book that way, I think I might have enjoyed it more. Plus, the descriptions were dull. I know they were symbolic, but life is too fast paced to mull over intricate details. Us readers want a story, and a story soon. We don't want to wait ten million pages for the story to pick up.

The Red Badge of Courage was another book I could not get into. In fact, it was so bad that I don't even remember what it was about. I was immediately bored upon reading the first chapter and tried to pick it up, but I purposely erased the story from my mind, so if you want analytical points, I have none.

Novels by William Faulkner. I found his writing completely unreadable. My brain would shut down after a few paragraphs. That said, I ADORE his short story A Rose for Emily. That one is deliciously creepy.

I try to take the cultural milieu of classics into consideration. Most of them were written pre-TV. People had longer attention spans in general, and books served as contemporary versions of the Travel Channel or Discovery Channel. (For example The Hunchback of Notre Dame and it's many chapters on the street plan of Medieval Paris, or Moby Dick with it's exhaustive descriptions of rope and harpoons.) Also, we usually read a book alone, but in the past someone might have read aloud while the rest of the room worked. There are a number of classics that I struggled through in print, that I enjoyed listening to as a book-on-tape. (I'm even willing to give Faulkner another try as a recording.)

I had a tough time with Wuthering Heights. It made me want to scream, though that may have been the point.