Before I give this further thought I'd like clarification as to how you presented the novels. Did you present them as being "adventure novels" or did your class label them as such?
I ask because that may be part of your problem right there. Two years ago when my History/English class read
Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs the teacher presented it to us as being "an adventure story written for young boys". He didn't want us to
read it in that light but he wanted us to know how it had originally been recieved. Unfortunately the vast majority of the class took it soley in that light and refused to look at it as being anything beyond an "adventure story", boys and girls alike practically no one liked it. Had our teacher presented it to us without calling it an adventure story (or had more people been able to step beyond that) we would have been able to read it more as he had ment for us to, as a way to understand the time period in which it was written...or even as a way to see if the literature for "young boys" has changed.
Which brings me to a second possible point. Still using
Tarzan, I would point out that none of us students qualified as a "young boy". We were all teens and were being asked to read something written for children younger than ourselves. I know for myself that had it been left to me I probably would have never read
Tarzan because it was a kid's book, similarily though I know and enjoy the
story behind
Treasure Island I have not once been able to read it through because every time I pick it up I view it as a children's book, and turn to something more my level.
The Hobbit, conversely, I've known for as long as I can remember. It was presented to me when I was a good age to enjoy it and because I liked it I have continued reading it even though, were I to pick it up for the first time now, I may discard it as I do
Treasure Island. It may simply be that your class is to old an audience to look at these books as anything but beneath them.
Finally, to address this:
Quote:
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Imagine teaching "Little Women" to fifty teenaged boys.
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The same class which read
Tarzan had earlier in the year read
Little Women, and though the reading of this novel was less formal and prone to less in-class discussion I can say that it was, as a whole, liked only marginally more than Bourrough's novel. For myself I can say it was liked much less. It's not that I "connected" to one book more than the other, for in truth I probably did have more in common to the characters in
Little Women, but simply that I found it annoying to read and boring. Dislike of a book can come from nothing more than that, and if that's the case you'll have a harder time convincing them to put aside their dislike than Sisyphus has of getting his boulder to the hill top.