Of the classics I have read all of Austen, most of Bronte and a couple of Dickens. Jon is a Dickens fan.

I have studied three Shakespeare plays and seen a few adaptations over the year,

I have not read 100 years in Solitude but I have read Love in the Time of Cholera.

I tend to more modern novels now, because I am often tired when reading.

My favourite older "classics" are:

To Kill a Mockingbird
Pride and Prejudice
Miss Pettigrews Day Out
Love in a Cold Climate

My least favourite classics that I did finish -
The Heart of Darkness
Wuthering Heights

I loved Harry Potter back when I read them all. I don't know what I would think now - as time goes on you can view things differently. I am a huge Agatha Christie fan and some of her novels are very dated now - it's hard to know how to judge novels from a different era and the views and perspectives which now can seem sexist or racist or narrow minded in many ways.

I was in my late 20s/early 30s when the Harry Potter books came out and I simply adored them. A few years ago I read them again with my son and I still enjoyed them a lot! And it felt really great that we shared a mutual love for HP books.

Fascinated by how much overlap there is and how much utter divergence.

I was an English major (in 1982 English meant English so all we read was British or American works - though I supplemented with seminars on Caribbean lit and African lit) so many of these I read not by choice. Have always adored Jane Austen, however, and was shocked and delighted by how hilarious and wonderful Vanity Fair was since it sounded dry as dust.

Oh, Vanity Fair! I read it on my first trip to the UK and Europe when I was 19 or so and just gobbled it up, laughing out loud at all those snide authorial interventions. I have re-read it several times since.

Irina and Gaylene -- thank you for those kind words.

A great question is which classics have you re-read (or re-read more than once) and why, and how did they differ? Obviously lots of complicated answers to that!

I have the Elena Ferrante Neapolitan books on my Kindle but haven't gotten into them yet. I'll do a page or two but it's not clicking for some reason. Ditto Demon Copperhead.

Generally I am an unabashed non-finisher if a book isn't grabbing me. And occasionally I'll go back after giving up and find I enjoy it very much on the second try.

I too abandon books if they don't pull me in. Sometimes I return if something gets a ton of accolades and sometimes am rewarded but sometimes not.

Huge fan of Daniel Pennac's Reader's Bill of Rights:

1. The right to not read

2. The right to skip pages

3. The right to not finish

4. The right to reread

5. The right to read anything

6. The right to escapism

7. The right to read anywhere

8. The right to browse

9. The right to read out loud

10. The right to not defend your tastes

Ooh, there's this supplement as well, from blogger Kiera Parrott:

The right to read at your own pace.

The right to choose whatever book you want.

The right to read graphic novels and manga.

The right to read magazines.

The right to read non-fiction.

The right to not like a book.

The right to read books published for different age levels

April I love that bill of rights! DS is a massive manga reader and hearing him talk about the themes, art and historical parallels is far more interesting than many reflections on books I've heard. Horses for courses indeed, and what a blessing we have so much wonderful writing to choose from!

Another thing: When I was a kid (junior high or maybe high school), my brother gave me The Lord of The Rings Trilogy and The Hobbit for Christmas. He suggested I read The Hobbit first. The first fifty pages were about the round green door. I gave up, and never read any of them. My husband loved them so much he reread the trilogy when the movies were coming out. Whatever

Helena I am a non-snobby reader but it's a lifelong process to overcome the lessons of college.

JAileen same here. Mr. A is not Tolkien-obsessed but my little brother is and several past boyfriends were and they all insisted I shoud try again. Nope. Problem began when I was 13 or so and read Watership Down, which I adored. Was having trouble adjusting to life without WD when someone said, "Oh, then you should read The Hobbit." No, no, no - these are wizards and made-up creatures! WD is about rabbbits!

FWIW, I had the same response to Game of Thrones. And have never read The Chronicles of Narnia, though I would probably enjoy that series.

To me, fantasy is completely different from science or speculative fiction, which I can deeply enjoy.

Like MsMary, I refuse to feel guilty for letting go of expectations on reading something because it seems like a prerequisite or a classic. I have stopped books in various places when they started feeling repetitive or aimless, when I hate all the characters or find them unbelievable, or they feel overwhelming or make me feel like I’m trudging through them rather than enjoying them. Life’s too short for that.

Currently reading The Future, a novel by Naomi Alderman. I’m kinda a sucker for a dystopian story.

Maybe, maybe April, if you loved Watership Down you would like the Duncton Wood series? The first one could stand alone if you were not sure. They are about moles in England and really added to my enjoyment of my travels in the English countryside since lots of the stone circles were referenced ( this is before Outlander!) I even made a special visit to Whytham Wood near Oxford, which the fictional Duncton Wood was based on. I tried the book because I loved Watership Down.

I loved loved loved Watership Down! Such wonderful characters. I also loved Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. I haven’t read a lot more fantasy though.

Sisi and Irina, you took the words right out of my mouth. Of all the things I've read and maybe disliked or not been a fan of, Dostoevsky is my line in the sand. I read Notes from Underground in High School, and vowed NEVER AGAIN would I read anything from that author. I haven't, and I feel no guilt whatsoever.

For most of my adult life, I've preferred nonfiction, anyway. I am a huge fan of evolutionary biology, cosmology and other science topics. I'd rather learn something while reading in my spare time. Lots of people love fiction, but so much of it is emotionally wrenching. I don't view that at entertainment, myself; I can watch the news and get that.

Echo, re cosmology: A friend of our son’s was the only girl in the US to have perfect scores on both the SAT and the ACT that year. A few years later I saw her at a Christmas party and asked her what she was studying and she said Cosmology. And I said oh, hair, that’s so great! And she looked at me and we both laughed and laughed. She’s at the Max Planck Inst. now.

JAIleen, that is fantastic! The Max Planck Society is so well-respected, and some of their research has been groundbreaking. I read the book

by Dr. Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, about the sequencing of the Neanderthal Genome, and it was fascinating.

With her amazing test scores and talent, I'll bet she had her choice of almost anywhere. She made a great choice with the Max Planck Society! And that is hilarious about the cosmology = hair!

One more tale of Harry Potter.

My son was six months old when the first book dropped. At the time I had a subscription to Horn Book (HA! Little did I know what I needed was a subscription to "Industrial Methods for Removing Stains and Dried-on Foods." A little-known industry journal ). The reviewer dismissed Sorceror's Stone by saying, "There's no there there."

So I put a mental cork in that bottle and went about my life. Fast forward to son age 4. We are staying with a cousin who is a huge movie watcher and has free access to her TV - neither true for my too-sensitive 4. They make it about 1/3 through and pause for lunch, at which point he pulls me into another room and says in a fierce whisper: "I DO NOT LIKE THIS MOVIE." That troll scene was far too intense for him.

So he learned the concept that when one is a houseguest, one accommodates the host without necessarily participating in every activity the host enjoys. We made a face-saving excuse and did something else while cousin finished her film.

JAileen - isn't it wonderful how those cringey moments can become things we laugh freely about? Love when that happens.

Hahahaha! No, I was making a joke.

I've been following this and it's striking that with the exception of Harry Potter and LOTR, most of the "should but don't want to" books are the weighty classics. I'm wondering then where the "should" comes from. Who told us that? HS (college?) English teachers probably. Do we truly still believe them? I might still believe them if I remembered a single one of them or even had ever had one I admired at the time.

I'm curious: if you had a great English teacher that you feel had an influence on your life, do you feel more inclined to think you should be reading "literature"?

Or if not from a teacher, where do you think the "shoulds" come from? I feel "shoulds" in a lot of areas, but reading is my love and I feel no shoulds at all about it.

Everything by Tollkien, CS Lewis after the Narnia Chronicles and Nietzsche.. They sound so interesting when people talk about what they wrote, but the actual works are soporifics for me.

Peri I would say the thing my best English professors did - and a few of my high school English teachers - was to illustrate how wonderful many classics are, even if you're forced to read them per a syllabus. I had a college friend, e.g., who was desperate to be an English major but was so freaked by the thought of being forced to read Beowulf he did a completely unrelated major: business. Um, pardon me for judging, but to someone who yearns for literature, B school is a 4-year spirit cancer. I started there myself and knew I would never graduate if I had to do the B school curriculum.

I absorbed that from him and then when I reached the class that covered Beowulf, I thought, "Michael, all that fear for naught." It was actually a great read for anyone who'd ever enjoyed folk and fairy tales.

rl I am adding to my list: Frank Herbert's Dune series. Anyone who enjoyed the too-brief series Togetherness will recall the wife's summation of the husband's obsession with that book: "Stupid-ass Dune." To which husband shouts from off-camera: "I heard that!"

I did read the HP books, but don't remember book to book what happened :p Often I prefer YA cause I'd rather avoid graphic sex or violence though.
In general, I don't feel any need to read things just to say I did. There are some movies (like DH says "the Godfather") to watch to get the cultural references, but nah, I'm good! I'm fine with being out of the loop sometimes
ETA- now music is important to me to keep up with! I don't always love it, but there's always something new to like.

I love this thread which has made me feel not so bad about falling at the wayside when reading:

1. War & Peace - I got bored in the stuff about the Masons...and
2. Paradise Lost by Milton.

Not sure why I haven't been following this thread!

JenniZ - re Tess of the D'Urbervilles I loved that book so so so much when I was reading Thomas Hardy during university. I went to London after I graduated, and I saw the original manuscript in a display of original works of famous British authors at the British Library, and I cried!

As a kid I had no interest in Watership Down - my best friend adored it. I also have zero interest in Lord of the Rings.

I had many good English teachers over the years. Their job was to expose us to the classics, and and to teach us how to write - for our lives, as it turns out. Not many of us would have picked up Moby Dick for fun in 10th grade, but I can still visualize discussions in that class about the whiteness of the whale! Senior year we had to read Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth. I abhorred it. The teacher was a pip, and just threw at us as much as we could take! Decades later my father was in a class at the Oscher Institute at CMU and they read the Joyce Cary trilogy, of which THM is a part. I brought back his books, and may give it another try. Maybe you need to be much older than 17 to appreciate it?

Thanks Laurie! I probably should have been older than late teens/early twenties perhaps, I was such a goody-two-shoes in those days. Not sure I will try again, I have accepted that my tastes are either for fantasy or rather low-brow.
April, I would like to know if you have ever heard of or tried the Duncton Wood books? I do honestly think you might enjoy them.