Maybe start with just books that sound fun or are less 'high brow'?

Is there any film or show you particularly like? If so see if there's a book version and start out with reading that.

If you aren't 'a reader' then starting with dense allegorical 1800s Russian literature is setting yourself up for failure. Read fun stuff and start to push your boundries from there. Your tactic is like if you'd never seen a film since childhood so you decide to start with 1960s new wave french arthouse films. A bold choice, but very likely to just bore and confuse you.

You're likely falling asleep because you're exercising your brain in a way it's not used to. It should get better as you go. The same thing happened to me when I got back into reading and then again when I started reading regularly in French. And both times it slowly went away as I kept reading.

Start with short fun novels, starting off with something huge and dense is just setting yourself up to quit

From the two examples you gave, Dostoevsky and Premchand, you're trying to go from reading nothing longer than newspaper articles to reading classics.

The thing with classics is - they are like a slow roasted meat dish. You start with many, many routine, mundane steps and then after a whole day of cooking you finally have the pay-off of extremely delicious food. To people who naturally enjoy the mindless chores of cooking or people who love the dish, all that mundanity is worth it, and there's something joyous about doing little things that give such brilliant results.

But if your cooking is usually limited to 20-min Hello Fresh meals - it's gonna be a chore to make such a dish. You're gonna be bored out of your mind stirring the damn pot throughout the day, and you're gonna wonder why anybody even bothers. Then you're gonna walk out of the kitchen while the damn thing simmers - and suddenly realize the whole thing has burnt.

You gotta build up to things.

Read contemporary fiction. And don't worry if it's "not a serious book". People like me, who love reading, we started out with small, un-serious books - we just did it as kids, and got sucked into the hobby. Just because you're starting out as an adult doesn't mean you get to skip steps!

I would also recommend trying various genres, and sticking to books published in the 21st century and ones that are not marketed as "classics of the genre".

• Read a memoir - Trevor Noah's Born A Crime is amazing (& I read it without knowing who the guy was)

• Read a thriller - I really liked David Baldacci's "The Innocent" when I was new to the genre

• Read a narrative non-fiction - Ben McIntyre's "A Spy Among Friends" is brilliant, but I may be biased by my fascination with the Philby Story

• Read a pop science book - Mary Roach's Bonk: The Curious Science of Sex might be of interest - which college student doesn't wanna read about sex!? (And I say this as an asexual person myself - it was very entertaining and curious)

• Read a short story collection - I recently read one about an elderly serial killer that was great fun, An Elderly Lady is up to No Good

• Read a popular science fiction novel - Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary was great fun, but I wouldn't have gotten through it without the audio book. On this note, also try different mediums!

• Read a graphic novel - Joe Sacco's Palestine is what got me into it. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi was also really good

Read a romance, read a book about sports, read a fantasy, heck google a list of genres and just read the first book that comes up when you google the genre! As with anything else, the trick to enjoying an activity is trying various things till you discover your tastes!

Hi there. This subject has been very popular in the past. Please use reddit search and/or check the /r/books/wiki/faq.

What books work well for you are tied to directly what cultures and narratives you're experienced in.

I read Lord of the Rings in elementary school so when I discovered Beowulf and Shakespeare I threw myself down that rabbit hole because it was something related to a culture I already was directly adjacent to so I latched onto it as familiar. And ended up pairing nicely with C.S. Lewis, go figure they knew each other.

Reading Once and Future King makes an insane amount of sense if you're already familiar with Sword in the Stone, Frankenstein makes more sense if you've seen Brook's Young Frankenstein. Dracula makes more sense if you've read Frankenstein. Alice in Wonderland and Shakespeare. Lord of the Flies and Heart of Darkness.

That's kind of thing. Strong writing doesn't come out of nowhere, it's built on other strong writing, and the culture of that time. Shakespeare's writing was based on other stories, and those stories based on other stories.

Canterbury Tales for example arguably is the story that Once and Future King critiqued, just as it itself is a critique of feudalism.

That's the thing, if you're not already familiar with the culture and the story the work is about, you're not going to get the devilishly good bits that make classics classics.

Paradise Lost and Dante's Inferno are pretty meh if you're not already familiar with Christianity and varying retellings of those stories.

To do the examples you're doing Ulysses is tied to Joyce, the Odyssey, the Iliad by association, and his personal cultural background in the UK. Strongly suggest reading both Tale of Two Cities and Dubliners first, because Tale of Two Cities does a strong job of setting up the power of class division in historical Europe, which people outside of Europe may not fully understand, and Dubliners is tied to Joyce's personal background, as well as a subtly Jewish familiarity which has its own history. That's a long story.

Atlas Shrugged is great if you're looking at similar political lit, 1984 pay attention to doublespeak, BNW, paying attention to mass complacency, Mein Kampf, 1920s Corporatism in the US, something about Botox and Butter. Industrialism in London. That's all a rich pool, but you have to start with the introductions before you get to the meat. You can even look at classical Greek philosophical arguments and contrast it with Atlas Shrugged, but again, if you don't have bread around your meat you don't have a sandwich.

The living thread that connects all these stories is the relation of history to storytelling, something I'm involved deeply in, and that link is what allows me to rotate between cultures. Godzilla makes a hell of a lot of sense when it's read in connection to the hush hush horror of the 50s atomic bomb, and the cold war looming around it.

Thanks for the advice :) I'll try to stay away from the classics for the time being and read some contemporary stuff. Btw, how do you know about Premchand? Are you from India?

Yes, I am!

Though I have actually never read Premchand - my Hindi reading skills are abysmal (I'm Bengali). I keep meaning to find a good translation - will get around to it one of these days.

If you don't mind answering, where exactly in India are you from? Not too many people speak/read Farsi these days in my experience - though almost every well-educated man in my grandparents' generation did.

Well, I live in Hyderabad and my dad's family is also from around here. I can speak/read/write Farsi because my maternal grandfather was actually from Iran, from a place called Mazandaran he then came to India during the independence and married and settled here later onwards. My mother ended up adopting Farsi as her first language/mother tongue and hence I know Farsi fluently because of it.

Apart from my mother and her siblings, I've literally never seen anyone who knows Farsi, here in Hyderabad even though in Pre-independence era Farsi was the lingua franca in the Nizam ruled Hyderabad state. Farsi literature is the toughest one to crack, especially the classics. One cannot even comprehend the difficulty of the original works of Rumi and Saadi Shirazi in Farsi. Most of the translated works of Rumi just takes away the soul of that work.

Ah, I was wondering if there was a recent Iranian immigrant in your family, when recommending Parsepolis (it's set in late '70s Iran)! But then figured maybe there's some pocket of India left where Farsi is still spoken as a first language.

Yes, pre-British colonial rule, Farsi was the lingua franca between all the various Indian kingdoms (probably thanks to the Mughal influence). It remained extremely popular as a second language for the Bengali elite (& the Awadhi elite, probably others too) throughout colonial rule - and my family still has some Farsi books from my grandfather's collection. But in the past 40/50 years the popularity has fallen off a cliff (right alongside the rise of English as the lingua franca I guess). There are still colleges in Bengal that have Farsi departments, but they're dying out for lack of funding and interest.

It's a shame, Farsi sounds beautiful to my ears. Hopefully you and your cousins can pass down Farsi to the next generation!