What you’ve done here is the equivalent of deciding you want to start hiking, then heading straight up the tallest mountain in the alps, then deciding you’re bad at hiking.
Pick something short that is written in modern English and try to analyze that. Harrison Bergeron, maybe? It’s a classic, famous, famous author, and is used in high school English classes.
I used to read and reread Fannie Flagg’s books with my Grandma when things got shitty. When she died, the books helped a lot.
Try Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland
I think Unsheltered and Prodigal Summer are her best. I’m one of the few people who didn’t like Demon Copperhead or the Lacuna. Idk, maybe I don’t like the ones where she writes in a male voice, but DC drove me nuts and the Lacuna bored me.
Don’t apologize for growing. It’s a good thing. Not your fault the author didn’t grow while you did.
I love authors where you can start with their early work and watch them mature as artists. Barbara Kingsolver is a great example of that. Bean Trees is an amazing novel and it will always have a place on my bookshelf, but her later books like Unsheltered have so much more depth and substance.
Reading a sexy vampire book every day is better than reading Proust once a year. Have some fun. Life is too short to drown in dense prose when you’d rather be laughing at the antics of a bumbling cop or puzzling out why the socialite changed her will the day before she was murdered.
I can’t listen to them. They’re so bloody slow compared to my normal reading speed that most of the time, I’m bored to tears in minutes, and the other times I fall asleep, lol.