A few weeks ago, when I was meeting a new class, the tutor asked us to name our most and least liked texts from our English degree. He carefully noted down each title, both the ones we loved and the ones we hated. I was amused by his interest. Why did it matter which texts we disliked?

In school, I always believed that if I disliked a classic, that meant I didn’t understand it. This wasn’t my fault: we’ve been told this for centuries. As Shakespeare’s friends wrote in the Preface to the First Folio, “if then you doe not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger, not to understand him”. 

Now, I believe I have every right to dislike a book. My Oxford degree has introduced me to some texts that I will return to in every season of my life, and others I am happy to never think of again. I think it’s not just the books I loved, but the ones I hated that have taught me who I am as a thinker and as a human being. 

In that spirit, here are my five least favourite texts from my undergraduate English degree.

5. The Waste Land (1922) – T.S. Eliot

I can only express a mild dislike of The Waste Land. After all, it’s a poem that doesn’t care whether you enjoy it or not. Over 433 lines, the poem outlines a bleak vision of a crumbling post-war world, where God has turned a blind eye and nature has dissolved into “stony rubbish”.

The poem is a collage of quotations, including from librettist Richard Wagner—in the original German, Roman satirist Petronus—in the original Latin, and the ancient philosophical texts the Upanishads—in the original Sanskrit. To be helpful, Eliot added dozens of annotations. Only, these annotations range from mysterious to outright misleading.

Basically, in his Modernist aesthetic, Eliot decided to write a poem that only he could fully understand. Still, I have a begrudging respect for Eliot; I think he would find my dislike of his poem deeply satisfying.

4. The Battle of Maldon (c.991) – Anon.

I loved studying Old English. I couldn’t resist texts that featured dragons, visions of bleeding crosses, and monstrous women who ‘sat’ on celebrated warriors (Grendel’s mother in Beowulf). However, I struggled to get excited about ‘The Battle of Maldon’, a poem about the heroic courage of common men who fought the Vikings in 991.

Maybe I was annoyed at the complete absence of women in the poem. Maybe I was infuriated that the English fighters allowed the Vikings to cross the river, despite knowing they would be killed. Either way, this wasn’t my cup of tea.

3. Heart of Darkness (1899) – Joseph Conrad

While I will never enjoy Heart of Darkness, I will admit it changed my life. The book explores sailor Charlie Marlow’s journey into the Congo, as it is colonised by the brutal Belgian King Leopold III. The jungle is described as “the earliest beginnings of the world”, a place of “stillness” that is impossible to understand.

The first time I read it, I was shocked. From its style, I couldn’t believe it was considered a classic novel. From the way it dehumanised Africans as “prehistoric man”, I couldn’t believe it was considered progressive.

Inspired by these emotions, I wrote a 4000-word essay on it, where I found the postcolonial theory that still inspires me. My favourite description of Heart of Darkness comes from Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. He describes it as “no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two sentences: one about silence and the other about frenzy.”

2. Mill on the Floss (1860) – George Eliot

I must take some responsibility for my struggle with Mill on the Floss. With my bizarre logic, I decided to read all 400 pages in one day. All I remember is it was 4 o’clock, I had not finished, and I had somehow managed to stress-eat an entire box of stale Cornflakes. Suffice it to say, this was not my proudest Oxford moment.

If Mill on the Floss taught me anything, it is that literature should be savoured, not rushed. Also, if you have ever thought, ‘Why don’t people just eat cereal straight from the box?’, you are in deep trouble. 

1. Essays (1625) – Francis Bacon

One of my favourite rap songs includes a joke about “Francis Bacon in the corner of my kitchen”, so I was thrilled when I saw his name on my Renaissance reading list. However, Bacon’s essays combine all of the elements that evoke my literary distaste: a masculine worldview, explicit moral messages, proverbial wisdom over individual flair… 

In fact, some of my favourite texts from my course are those that centre women, like Charlotte Bronte’s Villette (1853), or those that defy moral interpretation, like James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), and those that are individual to the extreme—Marion Milner’s A Life of One’s Own (1934) comes to mind. Bacon’s nuanced wisdom and social criticism simply isn’t for me. 

My favourite example of literary hatred is Philip Pullman’s description of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, a text he studied as an English student at Oxford in the 1960s. He says “we might […] try to appreciate the worth of the The Faerie Queene and decide that yes, on balance, it is full of interesting and admirable things”. That is the most gritted-teeth praise of a poem I have ever heard! I have no beef with The Faerie Queene, but I love to think of Philip Pullman struggling over the same required reading as I did. 

All in all, I’ve come to enjoy being a literary hater. When we say we don’t like a book, we might be feeling something deeper—boredom, confusion, even outrage. These feelings reveal what we really care about as critics, whether that’s our values or simply our tastes. Pullman says that our favourite books are like a “key that unlocks a part of ourselves we never knew was there”. I would say our least favourite books are the same. So, I challenge you to find your inner literary hater. Ask everyone you meet about their least favourite book; you might be surprised by what you learn.