So everyone's happy with Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad (except for bikenrrd with The Secret Agent)?
No, I find most of the 'classic' authors to be tedious drivel.
A little like Kim, sometime in my mid 20's the switch got flipped. More or less when I did the last batch of vaguely serious computer programming I did. I stopped playing games and almost entirely stopped reading fiction.
Back in the day, I read the Hobbit, LOTR and the Silmarillion. I think some people were trying to read the Silmarillion as a book, but it's really a potted episodic history. Tolkien also said the LOTR is definitely
not allegory: It's just a story, so I never found it pretentious as it wasn't pretending to be anything. Looking for anything beyond the tale and the songs is a bit pointless.
When I came back to reading more fiction I tried a few of the 'classics' again.
Moby Dick seems to crop up a lot, but I enjoyed it. I actually read it because (for reasons too tedious to explain) I was looking for a description on early whaling, and found a note on Wiki that the best was to be found in Melville's work. Dickens - er, no thanks. Khalil Gibran, Hardy, Lawrence, Joyce, Peake ditto. Erskine Childers
ur-espionage tale the Riddle of the Sands was one I couldn't finish. Somehow it should have pushed lots of buttons but didn't.
Some Virginia Woolf I can just about read. Jeanette Winterson started well, but I drifted away when she wrote GUT Symmetries and haven't felt the need to drift back.
I read Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series more or less as it was published, then the second set, then... ... ignored him for twenty years, and when I tried to read them again, I gave them away because they were so unreadable. As were all the other books of his that I've tried to read.
For as long as I can remember, the only author I've found consistently good is Alan Garner, but he doesn't provide light relief. That usually ends up coming from Patrick O'Brian and Terry Pratchett.
The rest is non-fiction. I think I may not finish the OS X server manuals though, and the SGI IRIX admin manuals are somewhat neglected these days. Currently I'm also not managing to read VSM, Hydra and Signiant manuals, preferring instead the heady whiff of new cameras as I delve into the innards of Sony HDC2500s and Canon XJ27 Digi-Super box lens manuals. They're not readable, but I have far more need to read them than read Jane Austen.