I can list a number of them.
19th Century classics that are harder than hell to read or turned into multiple movies in the past hundred years:
Moby Dick, A Christmas Carol, The Three Musketeers, War of the Worlds, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Time Machine, Wuthering Heights, Robinson Crusoe, Tom Sawyer, Lord Jim, The Hounds of the Baskervilles and other books by the same author.
There are some 19th century authors I enjoy, Edgar Allen Poe and Lew Wallace.
Books I tried to read and quit because they sucked:
Ulysses by James Joice
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
There's an award-winning short story by Phillip Jose Farmer, Riders of the Purple Wage; I couldn't get past the first page. It was in an anthology of Hugo award winners.
12 comments:
A Christmas Carol and War of the Worlds are two of my favourites. I really recommend them. I read A Christmas Carol either in whole or in part every year around the holidays.
I’ve never read Ulysses either.
Yeah, those 19th century authors could be very wordy for sure.
I'm glad you like them, George
Lydia, don't bother.
Those are all solid choices. I've read some James Joyce, but it's heavy going. I've read Huckleberry Finn, but not Tom Sawyer.
A Separate Peace... we read that one in school, and it's high on my list of Books That Were Included In The Curriculum Strictly To Traumatize The Students. (See also: Where The Red Fern Grows, Bridge to Terabithia.)
I never taught that book, glad it wasn't on my curriculum.
A Christmas Carol is a favorite, and worth reading even if you know the movies, purely for Dickens' humor. A lot of people rave about Moby Dick but I found it underwhelming....I derived far more entertainment writing a review of it as if it were a nonfiction book about whales and whaling than from the book itself.
Stephan, that's a good take on the book.
I love Hound of the Baskervilles, but you are right; it takes a while to get going. Would never get published today.
I'm 100% with you on Wuthering Heights; I gave up on that halfway through.
Expectations were different back then, though... I think readers of that era wanted a thick book that took a long time to read.
Berthod, Oh how radio and movies and television have shortened the modern attention span. Social media is making it even worse.
I'm with you on most of these, although I did like The Hound of the Baskervilles and Wuthering Heights. I fought my way through 20,000 Leagues and regretted it.
Tanith, even fifty years ago my generation didn't have the patience to read Victorian literature.
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