I thought this might be interesting. I find it very difficult to read plays. I don’t ever plan to read Shakespeare for a few reasons. There, I said it.
I have no desire to read any of the great Russian authors. I tried ploughing through Anna Karenina as a high school assignment and ended up resorting to Cliff Notes. Impenetrable.
Plays are easier if you try reading them aloud, at least for starters.
Henry James. I love Thurber’s pastiches of his work, but can’t bear the work itself.
I’ve read “the Turn of the Screw”. I couldn’t work out what was supposed to be happening.
You know that sensation when you read a page and you don’t know what happened on that page? It was like that for the entire book.
I love plays. We have a “complete Works” volume of Bill’s, but I have lots of single volumes of individual plays too. I was contemplating drawing a cartoon version of “The Tempest” once upon a time. Other playwrights on my shelves include G.B.Shaw, Sean O’Casey, Tom Stoppard - got quite a few of his - Eugene O’Neill and Eugene Ionesco. Oh, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s plays - including Deacon Brodie. Seen it performed in Edinburgh. Boy, they made a real hash of it. Nice to read it and see what the author was getting at. Sometimes the actors can seriously mess things up.
Russian Authors?
Tolstoy is brilliant - he wrote short stories too. Try them! Pushkin? Great stuff!
On the other hand, Dostoyevsky was a sermonising monomaniac. No more of him.
Books I’ll never read? Most of them. There just isn’t enough time to read them all.
Books I’ll deliberately avoid? Most of them. With so little time, you have to be selective.
The first one to come to mind for me is Battlefield Earth by L Ron Hubbard. I tried to read this 1000+ page book a couple of different times growing up, but stalled out both times about 500 pages in. I don’t plan on ever trying a third time, especially now that I’ve become more aware of Scientology.
Milton’s Paradise Lost. Samuel Johnson’s take on it was that “…no one ever wished it longer than it was..” 
With best regards.
Stephen
Probably anything by Ayn Rand.
Rough Guide To Places Of Interest In Rotherham.
I must say that is an excellent choice, Emm! I was sitting here thinking and thinking, and having real difficulty coming up with something so truly foul as to preclude all hope . . . but I think you nailed it there.
Even though I came to disagree with the philosophy of Ayn, she did write an interesting story.
Critical Review of the Complete Works of Pliny The Elder by George W. Bush.
I hope I’m not getting the wrong idea here.
Going Rogue.
me too!
mein kampf.
bible.
jonathan strange and mr norrell (however nice it starts, the way it’s printed with all the side notes and bottom notes makes it hard to get, too much detail)
sure there might be others but those popped to mid.
so many books, so little time. I agree.
I still haven’t finished Atlas Shrugged, which I started in 1952. I shall also most likely pass on the Twilight books, the LOTR trilogy, and anything by Nietzsche or Ann Coulter, as I have heard they are both fundamentally unsound.
Even as a confirmed atheist I wouldn’t shun the Bible. Among other things, you need it in order to bite back when Christians misquote bits of it or take bleeding chunks of scripture out of context, a not-infrequent occurrence.
It. Or anything Stephen King wrote after “Pet Cemetary”.
Agree on the Twilight Saga. I’ve got friends begging me to read this - I keep telling them that a “sexy” vampire is Barnabas Collins.
Probably anything Dan Brown writes in the future. Mysterious society. Deranged antagonist. What’s his name wins. Predictable.
Religious beliefs or lack thereof aside, a person can’t be culturally literate without a basic working knowledge of the Bible.
I failed:
Moby Dick
The Russian classics
Harry Potter