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I love the fact I have 2 degrees in Lit and never read Moby Dick or Middlemarch. I have tried, but I cannot take George Eliot's glutinous prose in which each word appears to cling to the other in a sticky indigestible mass.

It's not the era! I love many 18th and 19th century novels.

Like Charlotte Bronte--cannot stand her sisters who are way too overwrought.

Like the Brothers K, cannot stand Crime and Punishment.

Like Tolstoy, but on re-reads, sometimes just read alternate chapters in War and Peace. My daughter said essentially I just read Peace.

I love Stephen Crane, but not the Red Badge of COurage, which is his worst. They choose it for high school because it is "suitable" for children. One cannot teach Maggie: a Girl of the Streets to 15 yos.

I actually do like most of the classics. Context is everything. But i get really bored with the dated "modern" classics. The canon needs to be cleared of things like A Separate Peace.

Although I usually like Edith Wharton well enough, I was tortured by listening to House of Mirth. The title is taken from Ecclesiastes 7:4: "The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth."

{Warning: Plot spoilers if you ignore me and read this!)

The main character, Lily Bart, is one of those wrongheaded fools who behave like moths and candles. And like a moth she darts around and around the flame before actually hitting it. And it seems so very, very contrived. You know when you watch a thriller and the stupid girl decides as a result of a specious phone call or other device to go to the scary place (warehouse, upstairs, the beach, whatever) into the power of the killer (man, spirit, alien, beast) and you want to scream at her? It is so painful to watch! At least she only does it once.

Lily Bart is even worse. She's more like that main character in X-Files who persists in sitting or standing before a darkened room even though he always gets hit in the head.

One night I was so depressed by this stupid book that DD thought when I came in that I had been fired. I would have just looked up the ending in Magill's but all the sitting room books were in boxes because of the painting.

N asked why I didn't stop listening. I said I was committed, and I had to know what happened. When I finished, it was even worse than I expected; the idiot inadvertently kills herself just when everything was going to be okay! She didn't even commit suicide which would have been a viable alternative.

We are supposed to think "Society" killed her. I think it was Darwinian forces! So pleased to think she died before breeding.

Hemingway. Some early stories, maybe 2, before Gertrude Stein became an influence. "Bernice cuts her Hair," I think, are okay. After that, his doubts about his own masculinity and attempts to hide his 3-dollar-bill-ness just pall way too rapidly for me.

When DD was a teen, I had her read The Sun Also Rises (best of a very bad lot) so she could get the point. Then I had her read the masterplots so she could sneer more knowledgeably and get basic references.

So much of "American literature" is literature by default. It's like the politically correct need to search for "early examples" of AA, women's, American, whatever, before any real body of literature exists. So they put up stuff because of when it was written and it is just awful.