5 Books I definitely do not love

Most of the books I have read which I do not love (hate seems a little strong - I wouldn't even bother burning them) are those which I have thought I 'should' read because they are 'classics'. I am a little embarrassed that I managed to get half a degree in English Literature without having read a lot of books that I heard referred to as 'classics'. Part of me just wanted to read them to see what was so classic about them, and part of me wanted to spend less time reading books which I could never discuss with anyone as I was the only one who had read them. It is surprisingly hard to think of a list of all the books you have been told are classics when you try to, so I started with the big ones and those I could find for cheap in the charity bookshop near where I used to work. As this is technically the number one spot, I will start with the book I have enjoyed least and that took longest to read: 1. Moby Dick As I opened the book and saw that first line, I wondered how many people knew that line but had not read the rest of the book. I now envy those people, and if anything good should come out of me having read the bloody thing I hope it is that I do warn people at every opportunity I get not to bother reading Moby Dick. I can sum the whole thing up in two sentences: Ahab gets partly eaten by whale, whom he inexplicably names Moby Dick before pledging to find and take his revenge upon him. To distract readers from the pointlessness of this endeavour, a lot of really boring factual information about whales is interspersed with the details of the fruitless whale hunt, making the hunting part seem marginally more interesting, but ultimately still not as interesting as closing the book and spending the rest of the day collating a list of all the things more interesting that whale anatomy. The single best thing about the book was that when I got to the point of desperation where I began to count how many pages I had left (this usually occurs around the mid-point of a novel, but in this case it was after about 100 pages) I found that almost the entire final quarter of the book was taken up with a series of poems and other crap about whales that were completely incidental to the plot (as was much of the stuff before that in fact), so much so that after only a moment's hesitation I decided I would not make myself read them, and in effect reduced the misery to which I was determined to subject myself by around 20%. I ploughed on with all the other stuff because I was not going to be defeated - having wasted a couple of days reading the bloody thing, I wasn't going to give up until I could say that I had examined the evidence for it being a good book and found it so lacking that I would even argue as to whether it should be called a book, favouring as I did the term 'punishment' at the time. I am aware that the novel is considered a great work, exploring themes of idealism vs pragmatism, the class system and so on and so forth, but however interesting the ideas may be, the novel itself did them no justice in my eyes. I am not unintelligent, I understand most of what I read and when I don't, I work it out or look it up, but rarely have I been less inspired to try and find out the point of something as I was when faced with hundreds of pages of whaling, broken up with the occasional storm. The pace was unbearably slow, presumably because Melville was cramming in all this symbolism and setting the scene for his metaphorical fight between good and evil, but ultimately, the genuine pointlessness of enacting revenge on an animal following their instincts is not something which needs much explanation. Maybe, if you decide you are going to write about how people's ambition can destroy them and make them fail to appreciate any of life's pleasures, the way to demonstrate it once and for all is to force them into the situation which I found myself in when reading the thing - my ambition to finish the book made me unable to enjoy any of the other perfectly nice books I had to read, tainted the ideological plan I had to read the 'classics' and made me feel impotent against whatever authority had decreed that this was a 'good book' (not THE good book, although Tim Minchin has written a very funny song about that, so check it out). So in a sense, Moby Dick was a perfect way to demonstrate the pervasive nature of unfulfilled ambition, but in another, more realistic sense, it was just really boring. On the plus side, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Whaling sums up everything I have just written in a much funnier and less long-winded way than I have, so you can gain insight into what it must be like to suffer through a really long boring book whilst enjoying a quite short and funny book - problem solved.