This could be from any age really. I remember reading lots of books like Harry Potter as a 4th grader to seem smart to the teachers looking at me but I didn’t understand any of it. When the big YA dystopian boom was happening, I read tons of terrible YA dystopias to seem cool but many of them frustrated me.
I picked up a copy of Dante’s Inferno as an adult because I remembered bits of it from school and it was in vogue because of the video game, so I was curious about the actual work. I liked the inferno, but then I forced myself to read purgatario and paradiso even though it felt like a slog to me because ol’ boy was just depressed so even paradise sucked. I feel like, looking back, the only reason to push through those last two was to be a pretentious twit who had read it. It hasn’t come up in my life since, except for this comment.
To be fair to Dante, he warns the reader in Canto II to be careful and stop reading if they aren’t following the story by comparing reading Paradiso to sailing a small boat on choppy waters.