Reading Promblem
April 11, 2011
Obviously this relates more to adolescents than college-age students. Still, some days the comparison is apt.
(Comic courtesy fo SMBC)
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The musings and wanderings of an academician.
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Ketuvim: the Writings of James R. Getz Jr. 
As a parent with a degree in Psychology may I suggest another option: “I don’t think you should read this, it’s probably too old for you.” This approach works 80% of the time 😉
I haven’t read Moby Dick, but I know someone who did. This guy was an avid reader (his every-day speech reflected this, unfortunately for him), but the main thing I remember him saying about Moby Dick was that the author really captured the boring-ness of being at sea.
Anyway, I remember as a teenager, my mom, attempting to give a corrective to my bad influence of my friends, IIRC, made me read Pilgrim’s Progress. I had to sit at the kitchen table every evening for a certain period of time reading the book. I mainly remember I spent the majority of the time simply looking at the text on the pages, and flipping them every so often to give the impression of progress. And this was someone who, even as a child, preferred to avoid abridged versions of anything (I was the only person in my 7th grade Lit class who read *all* of Great Expectations, for example).
Later, in college, I went back and picked up Pilgrim’s Progress (on my own terms) and read through the whole thing, and greatly enjoyed it! Though, perhaps, the problem wasn’t just reading under duress, but that I wasn’t in a place at the time that I could have appreciated the book.