tldr

If my book club votes against my selection of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, whom do I blame: myself, the book, or the club?

Wait. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens cut their teeth on Tolstoy. What are you saying, Constant?

"Only assholes pretend that they started out reading Leo Tolstoy or Gertrude Stein recreationally. You build up to Tolstoy and Stein, the same way you build up to running a marathon."

Strongly disagree. What if you find it interesting enough to attempt to misunderstand? It's how I got through Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky (and Coletrane and Bach, for that matter). Sometimes you know in your gut that you're facing something important enough, deep enough, that you have to do the manly thing and grapple with it.

Will it throw you the first time? Certainly. It'll throw you the first few times. But each time, you take a few more steps into the work, you see a little more, until you realize that you're standing within a cathedral.

woof: Were any of those really the first novel you'd ever read by choice from start to finish? Were you struggling with doubt about whether you were smart enough to read? I doubt either of those things.

I'm a reader, I've been reading novels since I was seven, so not understanding Dostoyevsky was intimidating but not demoralizing. I have a friend who's been trying to learn how to read novels, and hasn't yet finished one (she's around 30). It'd be cruelty to tell her to start reading Tolstoy.

Get to the point! Buy a Mac, IPod IPad IPhone or lap top.
What ever you do don't buy anything that has the word Microsoft in it.
This not to say you should not study Microsoft stuff as half the economy has been obliterated by technology and Microsoft needs all the help they can get before they screw it up past the point of no return.

Happy to be part of these De Jevu articles

That there are literate people who can't find pleasure in reading both mystifies and saddens me.

Once you get that library card, here's how to use the library recreationally: Any book that catches your attention for more than 2 seconds, for any reason (title, author, subject, pretty cover, nice smell), grab it. Stop when your arms are full - 5 or 10 minutes should be plenty. You don't have to decide what books to read right then because they don't cost anything. There's no commitment. You don't even have to read any of them, but you can try them all when you get back to your comfy reading place. Maybe a few will keep your interest - read those and take the rest back.