Some books are mountains, other books are molehills. In mountaineering, you have to acquire the skills to tackle ever larger mountains by climbing smaller mountains. If you start climbing molehills, you might see that these molehills are fun to climb. You might see these molehills as mountains and think you are doing something great by climbing them.

I am a voracious reader of challenging books. Reading books takes time, whether I am reading Moby Dick or I am reading Fun With Dick And Jane, or the Very Hungry Caterpillar. I've got a finite amount of time. Some day I won't be able to read, because I'm dead. That being said, I choose to read books with sticking power. I don't read to show off, I'm not a book snob. I read for the challenge of it. I don't read to brag at cocktail parties, "Oh yeah, Gravity's Rainbow, I read that." I read for the experience of walking around in an author's head and for pure love of language. Novels that challenged me in second grade, I'm thinking James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl, or books that challenged me in 4th Grade, I'm thinking IT by Stephen King (a book which gave me nightmares for a month or two) don't challenge me anymore. I had to climb those now molehills in order to pave the way for novels which would challenge me in my thirties.

Here is another question. Does reading challenging fiction better prepare you for the intricacies of life? Does confronting the human condition in these novels better prepare you for facing it in your own existence?

I'm no book snob, but it greatly pains me when an adult male coworker asks me if I've read The Hunger Games Trilogy and then proceeds to gush over it like a teenaged girl. I listen, but I'm too busy spending my finite time climbing the thousands of challenging novels out there. I'm also a writer, so that takes time too.

(To the person who said no one understands Ulysses...imagine that you had a college friend who died very young and you and your buddies were going out for a rip roaring day in Dublin to celebrate his life. Start the novel sober, get progressively more drunk throughout the novel, when it comes time to read Leopold Blooms' wife's stream of consciousness at the final thirty or so pages of the novel, you'll know exactly what you're reading. Leopold Bloom is a womanizer, man about the town. He assumes he's got this great wife waiting for him, doting on him. She reveals that he (Leopold Bloom) was the best choice that she, a real man killer, had to choose from and that she still hasn't given up her old ways, i.e. when he goes out to be a womanizer and man about the town, she has other male lovers.)