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A good friend of mine with impeccable taste says the three greatest novels in English are Ulysses, Moby Dick, and (drumroll) Pierre.

So not everyone thinks it’s horrible. And apparently the first 40-50 pages are not representative of the whole, since they were written to fulfill some serialization deal. He apparently gets fed up with it and starts sabotaging the novel, turning it into a kind of parody. But I’m speaking from what this friend told me 20 years ago. I still haven’t read it.

Hilarious, then, that I would read just up until the part where it actually gets better. My attention span for reading is shot these days, so there's no way I'll try again.