I think the book that I liked the least (bored me to tears) was Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Took me months to read that book. It was excruciatingly tedious reading.
Then there was Don Quijote. I had to read the two tome book for Spanish class. Took me 6 months. Really slow going.
Those are about it.
I’m sorry, kids who aren’t interested in learning things… generally do not become adults who are interested in learning things
Now, what usually happens is that there are children who are interested in learning things and get that interest beat out of them.
And then there are children who are interested, but who have no guidance in what to seek or not helped in gaining the skills they need… and it can end in many ways once they become adults.
Most people just stop reading as adults. As in, literature for enjoyment. I first ran up against that in college. Reading has been my main entertainment since I was fairly young, so I was appalled when I first heard it.
But then I heard from my ma’s cousin, who went off to the Vietnam War as a teenager, and he told me that he became an avid reader after he ran into me when I was a kid (probably about 11 years old). I was talking with my Uncle Chuck about the sci-fi books I was reading, and the various concepts in the books, and what I found cool in them, and how it connected to some of the science I had been learning, etc. And Pat (the cousin) thought: if a little kid could get so much out of books, maybe I could do it, too.
But he had a hell of a time, as he never really got into reading in the schooling he had had. And he never had much fluency in reading. He picked up one of those mass market, top-10 books, but had trouble getting past the first few pages… but again, kept thinking – if a little kid can do it, I can do it, too. So he powered through, until he was an avid reader. He told me about this later, after I was an adult.
Blind squirrel. Broken clock. CS threads.
Our required reading was great. I just wish I had actually done it at the time rather than years later.
It’s best to read complex and deep material early in life so that you can start really provactive threads later on.
I hated required reading and getting graded on it, so i took courses in high school and college that minimized reading.
Started reading for pleasure after stopping SOA exams.
Difference is that i don’t want to force my life preferences on the rest of the world, like our esteemed OP.
I was an avid reader as a kid, and did mostly stop in college due to course reading requirements and fitting it in the schedule. Post college but before entering the actuarial path, I read a lot in my free time. For a while I had a graveyard shift job and nobody cared if I read most of the time.
Actuarial exams put a severe damper on free time in general, and especially non business/exam related reading. I had a long period where I did little to no leisure reading that wasn’t exam or work related..
I’m back in the saddle again though, and I like it.
I’d been an avid reader until college and exams. Then I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed reading until I started up again.
This is awesome.
Just goes to show that tastes vary. I loved heart of darkness when i had to read it in school. The language is so evocative, and it’s so creepy. I enjoyed Don Quixote, too, although i read that in translation.
I was an avid reader as a kid. Then i took actuarial exams and had kids, and pretty much stopped. Until the pandemic, when i discovered novels again. I’m enjoying the raksura series now. 
I learned a ton of vocabulary from reading. I think that’s the natural way to learn language, hearing (or seeing) it in context.
Ayn Rand’s response is so very Ayn Rand.
Well, and I still read the good earth every now and then. I enjoy it more now than I did as a 14 year old.
The nice thing about Heart of Darkness is that it’s like 20 pages, so if you find yourself hating it, you’re already on the last page.
DQ otoh was a slog. In my (translated) edition, the foreword included a list of chapters to skip which made me lol.
I read a ton as a kid but didn’t have much guidance and so missed a lot of “good literature” unless it was required for school. And other than Shakespeare which seemed to be universally assigned, I still missed a lot of the classics. Then in college I just sort of quit reading for pleasure. (Except for one summer when I lived by myself and read every Jane Austen in the library.)
Not reading for pleasure persisted into my exam years, except for a road trip where my mom brought a bunch of Christian fiction and I read them all. Probably 10 or 12 books but they were basically all the same story.
And then one day I got stuck in an airport for something like 7 hours, so I bought a John Grisham novel. And I was hooked again.
a la Janette Oak?
I was a voracious reader as a kid, that’s what happens when your parents ban television and you’re still 10 years out from getting DSL.
Read a lot in college. But the exams killed my free time, and having kids killed my attention span, and now I can’t muster up the energy to read more than a couple books a year. It’s sad, but I’ve read more books than most people read in five lifetimes, so maybe that’s enough.
My mom’s books that I read that vacation, yes.
Yeah, this was my first “why are they making us read this?” book
I remember starting it in jr high, but I seem to recall that we didn’t finish it.
Either way, I remember nothing about the book.
The first book i really felt that way about was An American Tragedy. Maybe if i read it as an adult i would understand it. Maybe if my teacher had been better i would have understood it then. But when i read it, it was just a really long boring book about unpleasant people whose motives i didn’t understand.