What do you not like that most people seem to like?

I stumbled upon a YouTube clip in which someone asked Emma Thompson this question and stayed long enough to hear her answer – cupcakes.

For me, when we talk about food, it’s basil. I can’t stand it. (It doesn’t apply to Thai basil, which I love. The subtle variation in flavor between Thai basil and regular basil is a world of difference for me).

Drink: milk. I know I’m not that unique there, but my aversion to milk is strong. Having said that, I love all things dairy. Go figure.

Art: I don’t get the Mona Lisa. I learned to appreciate it as one of the most important masterpieces in art history, and I understand all the reasons for it, but she doesn’t speak to me. I’ve never seen the original painting, so I have to add a disclaimer here. Maybe when seen in the Louvre, she is what everyone says she is. All I can see, however, are unappealing yellowish-greenish colors, the fact that she doesn’t have eyebrows but has thin hair, and her smile seems to me just an ordinary half-smile. I don’t see anything mysterious in it.

The art I love never ceases to amaze me even when I see it on a post stamp. The thrill never gets old no matter how many times I’ve seen a particular art piece: in person, in a book, on the screen—from the cave paintings of Altamira to the granite Egyptian statues and the head of Queen Nefertiti, otherworldly beautiful yet so alive… to Medieval manuscripts, Botticelli, Titian, Leonardo’s other female portraits…El Greco, Velasquez… I can weep every time I see a photo of Brunelleschi’s dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, or Hagia Sophia. Every time I look at Japanese woodblock prints like The Great Wave off Kanagawa or Snow at Zojoji Temple, I feel the same rush of excitement, the same fulfillment only pure beauty can elicit. Mona Liza leaves me flat.

I’m skipping popular fiction – this area is waste and impossible to narrow down to the genres and authors universally loved. But in the art of writing it is Fyodor Dostoevsky.   

It always puzzled me because I truly love Russian literature and I liked—occasionally I still do—diving into the dark sides of human nature. I strived to read Dostoevsky’s novels and stories in high school and during my university years. It didn’t go well; I haven’t managed to finish anything. I thought, well, maybe I was too young for such deep philosophical/psychological literature, but my last attempt a few months ago when I tried to listen to Brothers Karamazov (in Serbian, to make it easier) failed again. After several hours, the familiar “Dostoevsky symptoms” started rapidly developing: I was annoyed out of my mind, bored, and angry for torturing myself.

I wouldn’t go so far as to agree with one of my friends, a well-educated and well-read columnist, who said that Dostoevsky was overrated. I believe that he is a literary giant, of course he is, I just don’t understand him.

This made me think, for the umpteenth time, about why we like or dislike things and what connects us with a particular person, piece of art, historical period (I’m especially drawn to European Middle Age, then, after a jump of several centuries, to the time of Enlightenment), and geographical area (for no apparent reason, I like Japanese Edo Period, and Japanese culture in general). I love David Lynch’s Dune (1984), for example, and among my favourite novels of all time is Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (the fact I keep repeating here on my website, as you know). From talking to others, receptions, reviews, etc., I know that most people don’t share my passion.

Not that I’m any closer to the answers. First of all, these are not important questions although, I believe, they occasionally do cross everyone’s mind, and secondly, the reasons for liking or disliking this or that are so numerous and personal that it would be impossible to find universal answers.

Nonetheless, do you have uncommon likes and dislikes? Who is your personal Dostoevsky?