I recently read A Confederacy of Dunces, and my feeling was "Yuck. These people were all awful." I looked at reviews, and some people thought the same thing, and the others were like "Ha ha ha. These people are all awful. Isn’t this fun?"

And I was left wondering whether the two groups of people have had different life experiences. Some have had bitter experience of awful people and it'll never be something to enjoy.

That one was ruined for me in college, assigned in freshman English. I hated it so, so much. And literature in general, if that was the literature they felt was so important as to assign it.

I mentioned a love for Shakespeare in a footnote, something I developed long after high school, despite-not-because-of my high school education. I found my way into it via movies. The same happened with Jane Austen, whom I hated as dumb-people-doing-dumb-things until the right film showed me how it actually was supposed to work.

Conceivably such a thing could exist for Confederacy of Dunces, but I'm not going out of my way to find out.

I lived in New Orleans for a time and read Confederacy of Dunces. Saw it much later as a play. Think it's fantastic.

But to your basic point. I was having a conversation with a college friend about series including Orange is the New Black and others that I don't remember--possibly Breaking Bad. And they just couldn't get into a series where you were supposed to sympathize with people who were basically, well, bad to various degrees. Probably (for whatever reason) some people just don't like anti-heroes in literature or video.

There's an interesting comparison to be made between Breaking Bad and its prequel Better Call Saul. Breaking Bad very much wanted you to like its anti-hero even while being an objectively terrible person. Better Call Saul is much less about thrilling to the horrors, but instead hoping that a deeply flawed human being can get better. And he's surrounded by other people who are also good, trying to make him better, and failing.

I don't mean to oversimplify; both are complex shows with extraordinary feats of writing and acting. But I felt Better Call Saul was a more interesting take on the anti-hero because it wasn't just horrible people being mean to each other. If nothing else, comparing and contrasting the differences is a good exercise.

I realize that there is no accounting for taste, but my goodness, A Confederacy of Dunces is laugh-out-loud funny.