Lolita
Nabokov gave his monstrous narrator the most gorgeous prose in the English language, and that was deliberate. The beauty of the writing is the trap. No novel has made readers more aware of being seduced by language itself. Modern Library placed it fourth; the controversy has never settled.
"I was already annoyed as hell by his rococo narration," one reader reports from the early chapters, and the ornament is half the indictment: "the repetition of nymphette-this and nymphette-that simply overwhelmed me," piled-up descriptions of a child that get labeled style. The register strikes some as "shrill and one note through out." The girl herself never gets to exist outside the filter, and her narrated resilience works suspiciously like a mitigation exhibit. For many the calculus is simpler: "the subject matter is just vile and it's making me feel ill," followed shortly by "I'm thinking of DNFing," which is how a lot of copies end up abandoned by chapter five. Subtract the scandal of the publication history and a well-made minor novel remains.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
