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 I think Pilgrim's Progress is fascinating as an historical document and an insight into how Bunyan read scripture and understood theology.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.

I had an interesting experience with Jane Eyre in that I'd manage not to read it until college, when I had to familiarize myself with it in conjunction with reading Wide Sargasso Sea.

I'm not sure that I can ever love Jane Eyre now, because of that introduction to it.

Also, JZ speaks for me.

Also Suela in re limitations of the thread.

I can't remember enough of My Antonia to comment on it. I don't remember responding to it strongly (at age 12), though.

Great Expectations. I think it has grown in richness over the years, for me. I read it at age 14, and also saw a British miniseries about it that was very faithful. (John Rhys-Davies as Joe Gargery -- gave me a perfect bead on his character.) When I was 14, I found the ending very annoying, because it did not seem to resolve a single thing about the Pip/Snot-nosed Girl interaction. (The 1940s movie version has a VERY dramatic ending, which is very emotionally satisfying, but flies in the face of the book.)

I can't think about the whole of the book and have it hang together. So, that's a criticism. Then again, so many little parts of the story jump out at me -- Jaggers washing his hands after every law-case; Jaggers's clark and his vast, unreflective love for his Aged P.; poor Joe Gargery and his battered dignity; Miss Havisham hobbling about the house in a rotting image of her life from 30 years previous.

Actually I think the weakest part of it all is the Pip/Magwitch interaction, and even then there's some frisson there (especially their first meeting); it just doesn't pan out in a way that feels strong to me.

Literature includes plays.

True, but I read some fucking obscure ones. Or obscure fucking ones. Or both.

Anyway - David Hare's The Secret Rapture. Hatehatehatehatehate. Fucking hate. (Huh. Apparently there was a British film done of the play. Still fucking hate.) The main protagonist (Isobel) is such a milksop, the protagonist's boyfriend is lucky to eke out half a dimenson, and the undercurrent of misogyny that I felt all the way through finally becomes the main current at the end. t whitefont Isobel is this sort of saintly woman whose life is going to shit: her father has just died, her sister is an "eeeeevil" Tory politician, and her stepmother (who is Isobel's age) is sliding off the edge of sanity. Her boyfriend is devoted but ends up freakishly obsessing when she breaks up with him so she can devote her attention to her family, and then he ends up killing her. t /whitefont Isobel is almost certainly a Cordelia-figure, but Hare completely failed to capture the inner fire that makes Cordelia a believable human being. And the fucking ending. Oooooh, made me mad. Ooooh. Grrr.