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.
The closest I got is reading unabridged classics in high school. Certainly picked out Les Miserables and Don Quixote for that reason, though I came to enjoy them for their own thing.