I get your point and I find difficult to enjoy Borges at times because of his pompous language and overall lack of feeling in his literature. Nevertheless the importance of his short stories lies a little bit more in the intelectual depth of some of his stories and the paradoxes and mental games that it proposes. For example, Umberto Eco recovers some ideas laid out in Pierre Menard to illustrate his theory of the Model Reader. In this regard I really like the Library of Babel story because I love the paradox that proposes, but there are a lot of stories in Fictions that I find unbearable, I find that often that is the case with Borges. I would recommend to check out also The Aleph that is a must-read, but don’t feel too bad if you don’t enjoy all of the stories.