The 40 Famous Classics You're Allowed to Skip (And Why Everyone Secretly Agrees)
The follow-up nobody asked for (except Antonio in the comments) :)
Okay, so Antonio called me out in the comments: “What about the other 40 books? Why didn’t Dostoyevsky, Proust, and Kafka make the list?”
Fair question. Here’s the truth: the 40 that didn’t make my “Actually Slaps” list aren’t bad. They’re just... different kinds of challenging.
“Slap” for me meant: accessible, engaging from page one, something you’d actually want to pick up on a random Tuesday. These books below? They’re brilliant. They’re transformative. They’re also exhausting, require specific circumstances, or demand more patience than most people have.
So here’s the honest list of notable classics that didn’t make the cut—and why.
The NOT Beginner-Friendly Hall of Fame
📚 The “Brilliant But Dense” Category
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1880) Profound philosophical exploration of faith, doubt, and morality—also 800 pages of Russian names and existential spirals.
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866) Psychologically intense and morally complex, but spending 500 pages in Raskolnikov’s guilt-ridden mind is... a lot.
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869) Epic historical novel about Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, but it’s 1,200+ pages and you need a character chart just to track all the Russian names.
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1878) Beautiful but devastating, and the pacing is glacial—great if you have unlimited time and emotional bandwidth. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVED this but I first DNF’ed it then returned and couldn’t put it down.
📚 The “Literally Unreadable (But People Pretend)” Category
• Ulysses by James Joyce (1922) Stream of consciousness modernist masterpiece that reads like someone’s fever dream—respect if you finished it, but most people lie about that.
• In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913-1927) Seven volumes, 3,000+ pages, and the most famous passage is about eating a cookie—it’s transformative if you have six months to spare.
• Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939) Joyce literally invented words for this book—it’s unreadable even for Joyce scholars.
📚 The “Too Much [Insert Thing Here]” Category
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville (1851) Adventure story about hunting a white whale, interrupted by 200 pages of whale biology and cetology lectures.
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605) Foundational work of Western literature, but it’s repetitive and goes on forever—we get it, he’s delusional and tilting at windmills.
• Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (1862) Epic tale of redemption and revolution, but Hugo will stop the plot for 60 pages to describe Parisian sewers. But look, I was obsessed and even wrote a guide and reading plan to go with it.
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996) 1,000+ pages with 400 pages of footnotes—it’s brilliant but also feels like homework.
📚 The “Existentially Exhausting” Category
• The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925) Kafka at his most Kafkaesque—bureaucratic nightmare that makes you feel like you’re reading your own anxiety disorder.
• The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (1915) Man wakes up as a giant bug and it gets worse from there—short but deeply unsettling.
• Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre (1938) Existentialist novel about a guy who’s disgusted by existence—perfect if you want to feel worse about everything.
📚 The “Problematic Faves” Category
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899) Colonial critique that’s also... pretty racist—important but uncomfortable.
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955) Morally nauseating—unreliable narrator doesn’t make it easier.
📚 The “Ancient & Hard to Connect With” Category
• The Odyssey by Homer (800 BCE) Classic hero’s journey, but it’s ancient Greek epic poetry—requires cultural context and patience.
• The Iliad by Homer (800 BCE) The Trojan War epic, but it’s mostly battle scenes and gods interfering—hard to stay engaged.
• The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (1320) Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise—medieval Italian allegory that needs footnotes every other line.
• Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667) Epic poem about Satan’s fall—beautiful language, but it’s 10,000+ lines of 17th-century verse.
• The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (1400) Collection of stories told by pilgrims—written in Middle English, which is basically a different language.
📚 The “Just... No” Category
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (1859) The opening line gets all the attention, and the rest of the book doesn’t quite live up to that level of sparkle. It has its moments, and I do like it in its own way, but it drifts into the slow, winding territory Dickens loved so much. It’s not bad just… a bit of a commitment.
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861) Dickens doing his orphan-to-gentleman arc, but it drags in the middle and Miss Havisham isn’t enough to carry 500 pages.
• Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (1838) “Please sir, I want some more” is iconic, but the book itself is melodramatic and preachy—Victorian poverty porn.
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) Gothic romance about obsession and revenge—every single character is terrible and there are zero healthy relationships.
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961) Satirical war novel with a confusing non-linear structure—brilliant but exhausting to follow.
• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973) Postmodern epic about WWII—dense, chaotic, and deliberately confusing (Pynchon’s whole thing).
📚 The “Victorian Sadness” Category
• Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (1891) Beautiful, tragic, and relentlessly depressing—Hardy finds new ways to make Tess suffer every chapter.
• Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895) If you thought Tess was sad, meet Jude—every dream crushed, every hope destroyed, maximum Victorian bleakness.
• The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (1860) Gorgeous prose about a brilliant woman trapped by society’s expectations—also heartbreaking and slow.
• The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851) Gothic American classic about family curses and generational trauma—atmospheric but oppressively dark.
📚 The “American Classics That Feel Like Homework” Category
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850) Puritan guilt for 200 pages—symbolism overload and pacing like molasses.
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939) Powerful social commentary on the Great Depression, but alternating chapters of exposition make it drag.
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929) Stream of consciousness from multiple perspectives including a character with cognitive disabilities—requires intense focus and rereading.
• A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (1924) Colonial India exploration that’s thoughtful but slow-paced and requires cultural context.
📚 The “Short But Still Somehow Exhausting” Category
• The Awakening by Kate Chopin (1899) Feminist awakening that ends badly—powerful but depressing for something so short.
• Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville (1853) “I would prefer not to” is iconic, but the story itself is frustrating and sad.
• The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892) Psychological horror about postpartum depression—brilliant but deeply unsettling for 20 pages.
📚 The “I Respect It But Can’t Finish It” Category
• The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser (1590) Epic allegorical poem that’s technically brilliant but also nearly impossible to get through.
• Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1748) The longest novel in English (970,000 words)—epistolary novel about virtue that goes on forever.
Look, these books are classics for a reason. They’re Important with a capital I. But they’re not all accessible, and that’s okay.
My original list was about books you could pick up right now and actually enjoy. These books? They’re for when you’re ready. When you have time. When you’re in the right headspace.
And honestly? Some of them you might never read, and that’s fine too. Life’s too short to force yourself through In Search of Lost Time just because someone said you should.
So Antonio, to answer your question: Dostoyevsky, Proust, and Kafka didn’t make the cut because they’re not beginner-friendly. They’re brilliant, but they’re also work. And sometimes you just want a book that doesn’t feel like homework.
Your Turn
What’s a “classic” you DNF’d (Did Not Finish) and don’t feel bad about? Drop it in the comments. I want to hear your honest takes.
And if you did finish any of these, I have questions. Specifically: how? And why? And are you okay?
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If this post made you think, laugh, or immediately text someone a quote with no context:
You can buy me a coffee on Ko-fi. Proust wrote seven volumes while chronically ill and barely leaving his cork-lined bedroom. I write this with six children and a full-time job. Proust had a housekeeper. I have a coffee maker. The comparison is humbling.
Thank you for being here.
Karen
Genuinely curious if this was at least partly written by AI—but also I don’t love the definitiveness of “why everyone agrees.” Obviously that’s an overstatement because no one ever agrees completely, but it’s also wildly untrue with something as subjective as literature. Some of the books on this list I don’t love, sure, but I wouldn’t claim everyone agrees you should skip them.
No. Just no. Worst take ever.