Gee, everybody hates John Barth!
It's possible not to love War and Peace!
The only Heinlein book I ever really tried to read may just be the wrong one!

My wife often finds stories I like "depressing". I don't understand her not enjoying them, and try to get her to see them differently. But I don't really know how, or what it is, exactly, so I wind up blindly coaxing her to read them less with an attitude of "there but for the Grace of God go I" and more in the spirit of "See ya see ya, wouldn't want to be ya"!

   About sex in books Kim C, a fiction prof of mine, Ken Smith, who teaches somewhere 'round there in TN last I heard, had a story in which a man "stepped out of his pants" in a sex scene. I teased him so much about it, demanding a brief yet ultimately triumphant struggle, that when it came out in his book he'd changed it. I felt a little guilty about the whole thing. It really came down to a difference in the pants we wore, me and my straight-leg jeans, him and his loose slacks. Ah well, sometimes it's not the joke that's funny, it's just funny to be such an asshole that you persist teasing with the joke.