Anna Karenina
I was never much into classical literature. Growing up in Russia, I had to read a lot of those books as a part of the school program. I can't say any of them truly enchanted me as much as my extracurricular reading - the Harry Potter series, Agatha Christie's mystery books, and Ray Bradbury's sci-fi among others. I always thought classical books were quite depressing, even boring at times. The dry sense of humor and long descriptions put me to sleep. In high school, when we started reading bigger, more serious works like Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky and War and Peace by Tolstoy, I just could not understand what the fuss was about. Sad and full of contemplations and inner dialogues was Crime and Punishment, and long, strings of unnecessary sentences that take up half a page was the latter.