I think Hardy's poetry is much better that the novels, and he did too. There are a few books that I'll admit to not being able to really analyze critically because they were so depressing that I just wanted to make the sign of the cross and yell "Out, out, damned spirit." That list includes Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure. Hardy's nearly unrelieved grim view of human nature is at odds with my own experience, and I can be very pessimistic.

There are people who just don't like Dickens, though

This was rough for me growing up. My mom is an absolute Dickens freak. (She actually wanted us to celebrate his birthday.) I tried so hard for her sake, but the only one that actually did capture me was Great Expectations. It's still hardly a favorite, but it does stick with me.

To add, I first read Jane Eyre a couple of years ago, around my 40th birthday.

msbelle, I thought Bridget Jones became throughly unlikable. Her self-obsession just became too much for me and the shallowness plus the flimsy plot made it not so much fun.

I loved My Antonia for the language and the landscape -- the sense of spaciousness, the world rolling out, the heroine capable of anything but for the constrictions of family and society (I think -- it's been a while). I was a NYer and an urban East Coaster and a snotty college kid, and I loved cities and dense hilly forests; I had no desire to go to the Midwest at all -- and My Antonia gave me an appreciation of a landscape I'd always vaguely thought of as flat, dull, and ugly.

I think it's got some beginning-novel flaws, even though it wasn't Cather's first, most notably some problems hooking up the mythic dimensions Antonia as a kind of new American/Old World legend with the smaller, psychological and social dimensions required by the plot -- but I do think it's magnificent.

Other Cather has been hit-or-miss for me. Can't stand The Professor's House or My Mortal Enemy, love the relatively obscure Lucy Gayheart.

My favorite Hardy novel is The Woodlanders, because it's wistful. But I haven't read much of him.

Nutty, I'm with you on the Count becoming much worse than the people who hurt him. He become a cardboard cut out of a person.

She *wants* to be what he expects her to be, but her innate self-respect will not allow her to.

I wrote a paper in college about how this makes Jane Eyre a feminist novel, versus Wuthering Heights, which is so very not.

I can't imagine reading Dickens for fun. He was marginally tolerable to plow through for school, but even the ones I didn't dislike (I'm sure there was one) -- it wasn't rewarding in any fashion.

I did try and read extracurricular Dickens during my period where I tried to read any book/play/poem from which I'd heard a quotation I wanted to use in conversation.

Thankfully, I'm over that now.

Oh, and does anyone else have classics/works of the canon that they love but figure everyone else hates? I think Pilgrim's Progress is fascinating as an historical document and an insight into how Bunyan read scripture and understood theology. And I find the allegory itself bizarrely compelling.

When I'm reading Great Expectations, I'm always surprised by how funny and lively it is -- because when I'm not reading it, what I mostly remember is how much the narrator hates himself. It is the only book which I find more painful to remember than to read.