Am I the only one bothered by the fact that "book" has become a synonym for "modern novel"?

I kind of liked Clarissa. I loved the BBC production, with Sean Bean.

"My soul is above you, man. Urge me not to tell you how sincerely I know my soul is above you. I would not conjoin my soul to yours for a thousand, thousand worlds."

I could not get into The Golden Bowl. I've tried repeatedly and I can't stand it. Arch conversations I can't make heads nor tails of, that go on for pages. And Portrait of a Lady is one of my favorite novels.

gotta agree with _the ambassadors_. james doesn't follow his own advice: the novel should be interesting.

my own highly-regarded bugbear of a book is _middlemarch_. it's an agonizing read.

I hope I'm not the only one who takes to heart the point about equating "books" with "modern novel". I always suspected that Francis Bacon was overrated, and I finally dug up his stuff to read Bacon in the raw, so to speak. And I was distinctly un-bowled over. Whatever his influence on social thought, I believe he is way overrated as an influence on the actual practice and development of science.

There's a nice fancy edition of his Essays -- which I have not read -- at a local used book store, I should keep in mind what I just wrote the next time they catch my eye.

Another guy who comes to mind from around that era is Milton. I was forced to read Paradise Lost somewhere along the way in college. Truth to tell, I read it clear through, and rather liked it. That was back in the days of my wayward youth. I suspect that today I would never get past page 10. And I'm someone who recently slogged through Aristotle's Physics. Maybe I have simply lost the taste for literature. But, I can't imagine many of the kids in school now would get past p. 2 of Milton.

I can't stand anything written in the present tense (except for the occasional scene ala Flashman)--it's too gimmicky and too self-indulgent-- so that leaves out maybe half the novels that are now being published.
I never could understand the appeal of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald is lazy in his use of language.
Much of Conrad is unreadable. He's too pictorial in his descriptions. I wanted to throw Perfume by Susskind against the wall.
On the other hand I'm the only person I know who liked Silas Marner.

I'll defend Henry James to the death.

But my own recent defeat (I see it as my own weakness, which perhaps says a lot about me) was at the hands of Trollope's *The Way We Live Now*. I had watched and loved a 2002 BBC miniseries version, and I was excited to enjoy the book. But the BBC had basically translated Trollope into Dickens, which for me is a step up. Trollope's prose was plain, no verve or wit. The characters never rose from the page because the narrator is so busy telling us about them rather than dramatizing them in action.

In terms of long poems, *Don Juan* was brilliantly clever for a while, but it gets rather tedious well before you near the mid point. I have a high tolerance for long poems: I love *The Cantos* and *The Maximus Poems*, and in each I know I grasped only a thin slice of the complexity of the material.

Finally, a disappointing but canonical play would be Marlowe's *Dr. Faustus*. There are two texual variants, but neither seem more than a rushed mess. (Compare: Goethe's *Faust*, a brilliant dramatic poem that simply cannot be performed.)

On more after finally: I cannot stomach Handel's *Water Music*. Handel took the complex mysteries of counterpoint, ironed out the rough edges, and sounds like the Court version of a John Williams film score

After enduring several readings over several decades, I'd pitch Mary Shelley's overwrought (and overrated) "Frankenstein" into the thrift store collection box. As a comparable work, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's "L'Eve Future" offers a fictional Thomas Edison as creator of a "perfect" female automaton; it's wittier, but features a nearly interminable dialogue between Edison and a young lovestruck English aristocrat who has been Edison's benefactor.

I totally agree with you about Crane's novel. So awful.

I would include Huck Finn and Ivanhoe as possible entries. I tried Lord Jim a bunch of times but that too was just a bear.

This is so interesting. I agree about the strange way that "book" gets immediately collapsed into "modern novel"--and would like to amend my original list by adding to it the agonal works of Judith Butler. I'm just not up for the jargon and the self-importance, and I'm not convinced by efforts to excuse or explain them as "performativity" or "rigorousness." There are many others I could add in this vein, but I'll stop here and use Butler as a placeholder for a style and affect that I find singularly off-putting.

I used to get defensive when people didn't like the same Victorian novels I like--or when they didn't like Victorian fiction at all. But that was a long time ago. It's much more interesting to learn about other people's reading tastes, to reflect on the differences, and to appreciate the variety. These things are so idiosyncratic and personal.

I do love both Middlemarch and The Way We Live Now--but I suspect a lot of that has to do with being invested in Eliot and Trollope as people and writers, being interested in what they were like, and how they grew up, and what they read and thought about, and how they came to write fiction. I like watching them work, I like reflecting on what their work meant to them and how it fit into their lives and their times, and I like thinking about how and why they are making the literary choices they do. It's also fun to see them solidifying and modifying the genre of the novel during the course of their respective careers.

James, for what it's worth, had huge problems with Trollope's intrusive narrative style, and honed his own more circumspect mode in response. He also had huge envy issues with Eliot (when he first saw her at one of her at-home salons, he found her "magnificently ugly--deliciously hideous" and yet he found himself "falling in love with her"). His own early fiction is in many ways a response to--and critique of--Eliot's. All of them had major issues with Dickens, but could not have done what they each did without Dickens as a foil.

I can admire James and his contribution to the canon, but, for me, his novels are hit or miss. I like Dickens, perhaps for his faults; his flat characters have a charm to them. Then only Trollope I've read is _Can You Forgive Her?_ to which I say--who cares? The conflict seemed so petty and contrived. That's my key problem with James and his some of his novels: the conflict is petty--I'm looking at you _The Ambassadors_ and the effort required isn't worth the reward.

The conflict in The Ambassadors is petty? After much emotional, mental and spiritual struggle, a man in his late 50s, Lewis Lambert Strether, kicks-over a lifetime of values and loyalties, turns his back on his former life knowing that he's wrecking his future which held the promise of a comfortable and honorable retirement, and that's petty? I'd like to think that the decision to make, or not to make, a profound, late mid-life, change that leaves your once-comfortable future problematic at best, is anything but petty.