Russian Literature. I can't say I've delved deeply into the works that fall into the category, besides War and Peace and Crime and Punishment. (My mother, who studied Russian in college, swears by Russian Literature). 
 I find them to be repetitive and ponderously long with occasions of absolute brilliance strewn in. Perhaps I'm too young to fully appreciate it, or maybe I just don't get it all. But while I was extremely interested by the main character, Raskolnikov, and his mental civil war that takes up a good portion of the book, I found that I was often bored by the side plots. They were certainly connected, and I feel kind of strange bringing up this question about a classic that is beloved by so many critics, but were they all truly necessary? 
 Dostoyevsky's work is a philosophical study of life and human action and I think is therefore less about the plot and more about the ideas. While that may be riveting to some, it just wasn't what I generally look for in a novel.