Is reading in this way truly providing them any benefit though?

I’m also currently reading LOTR for the first time after believing I would hate it my whole life—at some point when I was a kid I had heard that they were absurdly difficult and dull, and I kinda soaked that in. I’m so glad I decided to read them now.

I’m most of the way through The Fellowship and already looking forward to rereading…I don’t want to reread books very often. They are so immersive.

Have you read The Hobbit?

But I feel the same way you do with several of the classics. There were so many books I was forced to read in middle and high school that I probably would have gotten so much more out of (in terms of enjoyment, and also in terms of understanding/processing them) if I had been allowed to just read them. Having to read (actually: skim) 250 pages per night on top of other homework and answer questions about random, tiny (usually completely irrelevant) details to “prove” I had done so completely ruined the experience of reading them and, yeah, reduced my enjoyment of reading as a whole for awhile.

Not every book has to be about sex

You wouldn’t say "You just haven’t found the right dance yet“ or "You just haven’t found the right riding discipline yet“. You accept the fact that they just don’t like it.

I agree with your overall message but to be fair I’ve heard this about a lot of different hobbies other than just reading. Some people just really cannot accept that other people are different from them.

For example, I don’t really like videogames at all. I honestly don’t think I have ever had anyone other than crotchety old people just accept that I don’t like them, they always either respond the way OP did about books or project some pretentious anti videogame viewpoint onto me that I never said.

I have also had people refuse to believe I don’t like to dance. Absolutely a thing.

I don’t disagree, but I think authors do this because it is otherwise extremely difficult to capture the experience of being targeted.

What I mean is, if a character is being specifically targeted for abuse by multiple people over the course of years—an experience not uncommon among children who are “different” in some way—it’s hard to write that sense of frequent harassment, because this type of cruelty might happen a couple times a week but maybe you don’t want to just infodump “highlights” from the last few months, so instead it comes out like this. And to the character it might feel as if everyone is unrealistically cruel all the time, because even though the cruelty isn’t literally constant, it still greatly outpaces kindness. It’s really hard to get the reader to have empathy for that kind of experience if they haven’t personally experienced it, because any examples you give will feel to that reader like merely an isolated incident, but aren’t.

Does that make sense? I don’t know if I’m explaining this properly.

It’s still not really a good solution.

He catches his friend watching him across the room. He knows exactly what that look means: meet me at the secret hiding spot we’ve been to once before at exactly 2:17 am next Tuesday morning to discuss the new events.

The big one for me, and I don’t know if this is really a trope either, is when the plot hinges on this one character being able to do something that is physically impossible (or close to it) with no good reason for why they should be able to do that, because the author thinks all physical limitations are merely a matter of force of will or bearing the pain.

My favorite example: a character gets knifed badly in the leg and can somehow run for literal hours straight afterwards. I don’t care how high your pain tolerance is or how desperate the situation is, if your leg muscles are sliced up you can’t use that leg. Because you literally are not going to be able to move it. Because that’s what muscles do, and they only work if they’re attached.

Or characters will be getting bad wounds left and right, cover them in their dirty clothing, rinse them in river water, no modern medical attention, and then heal perfectly in 12 hours and no one ever gets an infection.

That sort of thing.

The big one for me, and I don’t know if this is really a trope either, is when the plot hinges on this one character being able to do something that is physically impossible (or close to it) with no good reason for why they should be able to do that, because the author thinks all physical limitations are merely a matter of force of will or bearing the pain.

My favorite example: a character gets knifed badly in the leg and can somehow run for literal hours straight afterwards. I don’t care how high your pain tolerance is or how desperate the situation is, if your leg muscles are sliced up you can’t use that leg. Because you literally are not going to be able to move it. Because that’s what muscles do, and they only work if they’re attached.

Or characters will be getting bad wounds left and right, cover them in their dirty clothing, rinse them in river water, no modern medical attention, and then heal perfectly in 12 hours and no one ever gets an infection.

That sort of thing.