I could not stand Wuthering Heights. In my opinion, it was very dry and wordy, with characters I didn't particularly care about.

I really hated trudging through Age of Innocence. Too bad we're doing so many assignments with it. It's the most pointless society story, and the main character is a coward and a hypocrite. Absolutely nothing progresses through the whole story because he's so delicate and worrisome, and at the end, he just gives up and holes himself away. Also, I detest society stories. They just make me become more and more irritated with everyone in the story, and make me want to throttle them and throw all their wasted money in a charity account or something.

i think wuthering heights was one of the worst classics i've ever read. i have no idea why it is so famous but now i don't read classics unless i really like the blurb.

I might get stonned to death for this but I never really enjoyed the Lord of the Rings series. I loved The Hobbit and I found the movies they made to be absolutely spectacular but back when I read Lord of the Rings for the first time I got through the second book and then just got bored with it. My sister couldn't believe it, she said I stopped at one of the most exciting parts. I'll probabaly give it another try at some point. Maybe the second time around I'll become a rabid Tolkein fan.

Originally Posted by Zen And Tonic

I could not stand Wuthering Heights. In my opinion, it was very dry and wordy, with characters I didn't particularly care about.

Hey! You stole my book idea :p LOL I'm glad to see I'm not the only one here who hates that book :x
I loved A Separate Peace...I even cried (I won't say why because I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't read it...but if you have read it, I think you know what part of the book made me cry).

As you may have guessed by the way I started this post, the worst piece of "classic literature" that I ever laid eyes on was Wuthering Heights. Ugh :x I tried five times to read that book... and after about 20 pages, I just could not stand it any longer! I don't think I'll even read that book.

Another one that is a "classic" that I was not fond of is Catcher in the Rye. It was banned from my high school, so of course I had to check it out to see why >.< It's because the kid swears and drinks and smokes (he's a teenager). The book itself is rather bland. :|

Generally, I love classics, but a few are just... uggggh. How can anyone enjoy these?

I really didn't like Wuthering Heights. My English teacher adored it; I say it was badly written. Besides, half the people in an AP CLASS were so confused, they didn't know there were two Cathys! You can't tell me the fault lies with half our class -- I say if Bronte didn't care enough to make the story clear, I don't care enough to read it.

The Great Gatsby really is not all that great. The characters are contrived and unlikeable. I'm all for likeable characters doing despicable things -- isn't that where all the fun is? But unlikeable characteres doing stupid, craptastic things? Why, exactly, do I care?

1984 is on my bad list as well. I love Animal Farm and 1984 strikes me as a longer, less-fun version of the former. Which is not cool at all.

Paradise Lost is an amazing book, I just can't sit through reading it. It's the first book I've been behind on in class, because I just can't make myself sit down and read. It's beautiful, but dear God, is there anything less entertaining?

I haven't even heard of most of these! We never did classics in my English class, except Shakespeare but that's like standard. Although I remember reading The Great Gatsby, but that was only in the snooty high achieving Literature class. It's like our school felt that an average English class couldn't get their heads around anything more than Only the Heart, which in my mind is pretty straight forward, and hardly a classic.

Either The Scarlet Letter or Huckleberry Finn. I like reading, but I just couldn't get into the stories... :?

I don't know if it's considered a classic or not, but I remember having to read this book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain... that was just God-awful boring.

My class is reading A Streetcar Named Desire in class, so since it's a play we're semi-acting it out. We're doing everything from our seats, but everyone has a part and they have to say those lines.

I wonder what the teacher will do when we get to some of the rape scenes. We are getting one chapter at a time, so I don't know how graphic they are. But still, I doubt they're appropriate for school. And even if the play is, we're also watching the movie, and I doubt that's going to be very appropriate.

I still can't believe that the teacher assigned this book. Isn't it one of those banned books you're not allowed to read in school?

I just read Return of the Native, and by god it was confusing. I've read many classics in my lifetime, I'm a fan of novels, so I'm use to lengthy language and trying harder to understand- but this book was just retarded. x__x

Here's some female literary blasphemy: I can't get into Jane Austen's stuff. The characters grate and the writing fails at being witty to me. I read some ways into Pride and Prejudice, but I kept putting it down. I think I have Emma, too, somewhere, so maybe that will prove more intriguing and less irritating.

A Tale of Two Cities didn't appeal to me, either. Lucie was very idealized and, as far as I know, based on Dickens's love interest. The writing style is a bit much, too, but I do appreciate parts of the prose.

Then, there's Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rowson. That book is so horrible that it makes me laugh. XD

Anyway, I don't mean to offend anyone. Some of my favorite books are mentioned here, but I can see why people would dislike them. :D

My uncle gave me Pride and Prejudice for my birthday when I was in 1st grade. My parents told me not to read it, so it's still sitting in my room somewhere.

I think I read the first couple of pages just to see what it was about, and why my parents didn't want me reading it. But I was in first grade, so I didn't understand most of it. I might of had a college level vocabulary, but I was no where near that good at understanding literature. I much preferred Artemis Fowl and Harry Potter.

There are so many classics that i find boring...but probably the worst one was Journel of a Plague year...a relatively thin book, but man...no good.

Either 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or Little Women. I had to force myself to read both of them, and I couldn't get into the books at any point.

Tess of the Durbervilles.

Quite possibly the most badly written, loathsome, mysogynistic(sp?) and blatantly self-contradictory book I've ever read!

The story is terrible, the writing style is even worse.

Thomas Hardy was a terrible writer, I don't even know how he got such drivel published, never mind how it somehow decended through time as a so-called 'classic'.

Stay well away from this awful attempt at a novel.

Gone with the Wind...I hated that book after I was done with it--yes, I finished it. Mostly it was the characters that I despised that most. I cannot pinpoint why, but I just have never liked or the movie that was made.

I loathed A Tale of Two Cities and Lord of the Flies. I have had to read both of them for school and I just couldn't stand them. As far as a Tale of Two Cities goes this is what happens when you pay someone by the word! It was very dry and over written in my opinion. I just couldn't get into Lord of the Flies. I usually like a good adventure but I just didn't care for this book at all.

I didn't like...what was it? Great Expectations. I just couldn't get into the book at all, and my teacher just kept TALKING about it. We had to do so much work for that book that it wasn't enjoyable in the slightest. I'll never forgive my teacher for ruining it...

Shiggy:

That happens with me a lot, too. I'll read a book for homework, and it'll be okay, but then I'll go into school and the teacher will spend the next 3 months talking about the themes, when there aren't any themes, and it makes me want to set the book on fire, even though it's not really the book I hate. It's more of the teacher / myself.

I had to read some story for Language last year, that was pretty good. It wasn't my favorite book ever, but I could stand it, and had fun reading it. But then my teacher made me write a twenty page paper on how it has to do with people being scared about technology. The book had nothing to do with technology, so I failed the paper and hated the book.

But A Separate Peace I couldn't read without falling asleep. That book I truly hated, even without the teacher making it worse.

A Streetcar Named Desire is more of a book that I hate because the teacher is making me write about things that don't exist. But we have to read it out loud in class, and we go over every single sentence and the twenty things it could mean, and get through half a page in the hour and a half period (It feels like 5 hours, it's doubly as long as all other classes). When we got to read some of it independently, I liked it a lot better. I can't even follow the plot, because we're reading it so slowly.

And all of the characters are idiots. If Stanley's hitting Stella, and trying to punch her, and she has to run away for safety, DON'T COME BACK, YOU IDIOT. Seriously, she's making horrible decisions that make no sense.