Of course you’re entitled to your opinion but what possible value did that long digression about the Battle of Waterloo have to do with anything? It was pure authorial self-indulgence and added nothing to the story at all. I think he just ran out of ideas and trod water for a while just filling the page until he thought up something else.

One of the problems with great books is that people seem to think they have to like everything or there’s something wrong with them. Moby Dick has some really dull passages, I don’t think there’s any getting away from that. Melville was a marginal writer during his lifetime, he wasn’t someone like Dickens who knew his public intimately and was able to cater for them. He was an outlier and sometimes got things wrong, so that at times you feel he wasn’t writing for anyone but himself. That’s part of its charm, in an odd way, but it’s also a flaw.

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien comes to mind. Either that or The Third Policeman by the same author. Mind bendingly strange but well worth the effort. In the first case, the characters invented by the author start coming to life, but really that hardly gives a hint of how mad the book is.

Yes, it’s far from unreadable (apart from the bits where he has to lecture the reader about whatever bee he had in his bonnet at the time). I must have read it at least ten times over the years and it’s one of those books you live with and find something different almost every time. I’ve read Anna Karenina a lot too, but I have never warmed to it in quite the same way, I’m not sure why.

If you take out all the irrelevant stuff, Les Miserables is probably only about 300 pages. And I mean genuinely irrelevant. Hugo was mad as a hatter and took off in whatever direction he felt like - long digressions about Waterloo, the Parisian sewer system etc - that really add nothing to the book. They aren’t even all that interesting in themselves, as well as having no bearing on the plot, so I think you can read an abridged version and still feel you have read what was important in the novel.

How can you love something if you don’t understand it? I genuinely don’t know how that is possible.

Because the OP was talking about average Americans.

I know who you mean: Steve Donoghue. Yes, he’s definitely an outlier and spends at least 10 hours a day reading, according to him. But people who claim they don’t have time for reading usually turn out to have time for other leisure activities. It’s just a question of how you prioritise your time, and for most people reading is way down the list of things to be getting on with.

I probably get through 2-3 books (depending on their size) a week because I’ve always been reading for as long as I can remember and I don’t watch TV. But I’m from the UK, I don’t know if that makes a difference or not.

Don Quixote. I’ve read it a few times and have never understood its high reputation. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the famous parts happen early in the book, because I’m sure most people don’t get halfway, let alone finish it. There’s so much irrelevant filler that there’s probably a decent abridged version you could get out of it that would be a third of the length.

Also, while there is a lot of great stuff in Proust, he badly needed an editor, and the third and fourth volumes are virtually unreadable when he gets into creepy stalker mode. That’s another book that would be much better if it were trimmed back a lot.

If reading is really important to someone they will find the time. It doesn’t sound like it’s that important to you right now, more a kind of vague aspiration that you’re half-heartedly trying to talk yourself into. That’s fine, don’t fret over it, come back to reading when you actually want to do it.

The Magic Mountain. I was bored to tears the first time and couldn’t finish it, and it’s certainly not a book to pick up if you’re looking for thrills and spills. I think it took about three reads of the book before I started to appreciate its greatness, you have to let it soak in.

When it came out, Lolita was seen as rather naughty. When I got around to reading it I couldn’t find anything remotely salacious about it. It’s uncomfortably funny, but the overriding impression you get from the novel is an unbelievable feeling of sadness, that these people are all doomed and we are watching a slow-motion car crash of people’s lives. Most first-person narrator novels can be quite a struggle because often the character is not interesting enough to maintain our attention throughout an entire book, but Humbert kind of seduces you - he’s witty and amusing even when you know he’s absolutely awful. It’s that moral ambiguity that keeps us coming back to Lolita - Nabokov puts you in the horrible position of sympathising with Humbert over Quilty even when you know that that they are both utterly despicable creatures.