The only thing worse than reading Madame Bovary was reading Madame Bovary in French. She was an unsympathetic character who created her own misery and then sulked about it. Even such a character might not have been so bad if not for Flaubert's longwinded descriptions of small details that, while artful and all that wonderful nonsense, gave me no motivation to continue reading it. Had I not been required to read it, and write about it (in French - joy), I would not have finished it.
