Books that people say are classics but I don't get it

Anna Karenina - Allegedly the best novel ever written according to some and highly rated by some friends and family members whose views I respect but I hated it. I read over 500 pages of it and then gave up.

The Life of Pi - Read over half of this before giving up.

Anything by Jane Austen or the Brontes

Anything by the Bronte sisters or Jane Austin. Also tried to read James Joyce's Ulysses on several occasions, with no luck. Even tried reading it backwards.
Anything by Henry James. His sentences are interminable.
I'll probably think of more.

War And Peace. Opened a copy and sniffed it once, and that's about as far as I got.

Phantoms by Dean Koontz.

Utter rubbish

I tend to like specific authors and having read and watched the film of the book the Collector (excellent) I was quite enjoying reading John Fowles - also famous for The French Lieutenant's Woman - many years ago and loved The Magus (also a decent film) so I thought I was really on to something until I tried Mantissa and found it nigh impossible to read. It's basically a dialogue in Fowles head and was nothing but hard work - shame after 3 cracking books.
Around the same time (70s?) I read a few lighter novels by J P Donleavy (Balthazar B, The Ginger Man, Darcy Dancer etc) and eventually got pissed off with his writing style. Can't remember which book it was but one of them just turned me right off and I haven't picked up one of his since.
To avoid wasting time I now only read books that my missus has already read and pre-vetted for me as we have pretty much identical taste.