Which are the worst classic books you've read so far?

The Great Gatsby...absolutely mind numbing

I think anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald is incredibly overrated. He was a prole with a lyrical prose style and a very strong attachment to other people's money. And...this makes me feel incredibly guilty, because I rever Russian culture...but I find practically every long Russian novel before Nabokov's "King, Queen, Knave" just about unreadable. Narrative pacing is not their strong suit. I sympathize with the non-fans of "Dr. Zhivago" below, as I found it particularly unreadable and have never even seen the whole movie version because it put me to sleep every time.

I was able to read and did enjoy "Moby Dick", mainly because I do like classic sea stories such "Treasure Island" and "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", but another classic I just could not get into was "Madame Bovary" by Gustave Faubert.

The "classic" books that have wasted my time most egregiously would have to be:

Remembrance of Things Past

War and Peace

Moby Dick

Siddhartha

The Stranger

The Lord of the Rings trilogy

Anything by Jane Austen. I cannot get through her books for the life of me, and I've tried several.

I had to do a book report on "Emma" when I was a junior in hs, and couldn't get through the book...so I tried the movie with Gwynneth Paltrow. Fell asleep twice.

You know it's bad when you can't even get through the movie!

The Lord of the Rings trilogy, a mind numbing collection of the words worst poetry bound together by some average fantasy.

Portnoy's Complaint

Wuthering Heights or whatever its called...had to read it for school...hated it.

Moby Dick....was a soso book...took awhile.

Hated absolutely Flowers for Algernon.

other than that..i like most of what i read...Reading Plato's Republic and the Silmarillion by Tolkien at the moment.

Frankenstein: It was sooooo long and just so repetitive. The ending was sad and all, but I hated the writing style.

The Hobbit: The story was cool, but the way it was written was unbelievable. Mind you, they made an awsome movie out of some truly horrible books.

Charles Dickens: They just sucked, plain and simple.

I've TRIED about three times to get through Ulysses, by James Joyce....never got further than four or five pages.

Moby-Dick (in an abridged form, thank goodness, back in high school) was pretty awful.