Choosing What to Read

What's wrong with me? Why am I so afraid to read what I want to and why do I force myself to read books that I normally wouldn't give a second glance to?

There is no possible way that any reader reads all the books that are considered some kind of classic. You have your ancient literature, your medieval epics, your renaissance poetry, your romantic novels, your modern masterpieces, your contemporary classics, and now your post-contemporary bore-me-to-tears pieces of crap. How do I decide which ones are worth my time and why do I care what other people have read?

My fear is that someday I'll meet one of my idols, let's say Stephen King or Jonathan Lethem, and they'll ask me what I thought of Fahrenheit 451 and I'll stare blankly ahead and drool. I'll be forced to say something like, "Duh, I got confused in parts and though I usually like poetry in prose, I couldn't read that thing." And they will walk away, aghast.

So why not just read it, you ask? It's, like, less than two hundred pages.

Because it's boring me. And so is *gasp* The Catcher in the Rye. The narrator and dialect of Salinger's book is really amazing, especially for its time period, but I'm so bored. Holy tube socks, Batman, Sylvia Plath was more interesting than these two books. And I hated Plath's poetry.

When in a book is it a good time to give up? These are two classics that I know are classics for a reason. And, again, they are less than two hundred pages each. What's my major malfunction? Am I refusing to give them a chance? Is it okay to admit that I don't want to read them? If I took a list of one hundred classics to any literature professor, what are the odds he or she would have read even half of those books? Slim to none? There are certainly people who would have read all of them because they made doing so a personal goal, but does it have to be my personal goal?

The thing about it is that while I'm bored to tears I allow myself to get distracted and then I go off my schedule because I dread picking the book up again. So it's really wasting more time than I can afford to slowly read two pages an hour. The hitchhiking book? I loved it, couldn't stop reading, read it on two different computers, and used my lovely Amazon gift card to get more travel books for my Kindle PC. Why do I stress about reading these travel books? I enjoy them and I learn something and, most importantly, I enjoy them. Isn't that what it's about.?

But (ah, here's the rub) what if I miss out on the greatest thing I've ever read because I lost interest? Won't the fact that I had to wait so long in a book for it to get interesting teach me about pacing and how to keep readers involved throughout the entire story? Didn't King say I would learn more from the bad books than I do from the good ones? How do I make that distinction because art is subjective? When will I stop asking so many questions?

I just don't know. What I do know is that I'm now about two weeks behind schedule because I couldn't stay interested in those books. They are books I would normally be able to read in a few hours and I couldn't even read them in two weeks, and that's frightening. I'm just not sure whether the blame lies with those books, with society, with my fear of the community I want to be a part of, or with my own procrastination.

Though I am sure it's some kind of combination of each and all.