Here’s a reading challenge: Pick up a book you’re pretty sure you won’t like — the style is wrong, the taste not your own, the author bio unappealing. You might even take it one step further. Pick up a book you think you will hate, of a genre you’ve dismissed since high school, written by an author you’re inclined to avoid. Now read it to the last bitter page.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/15/opinion/sunday/the-joy-of-hate-reading.html?referer=

This is the advice of Pamela Paul in The New York Times. I read the article while waiting for the library to open and having no real plans for what I was going to check out, I decided to try the advice. 

Which is harder then you think. The very first book I pulled off the shelf looked like one I’d normally enjoy…so I kept it. The following two, and I was pulling these at total random, also looked enjoyable, but I put them back. 

The second I kept doesn’t sound that appealing, but it was compared to another novel I surprisingly enjoyed about ten years ago.

For the third selection I searched and searched till I found one that I could see no reason why I might like it. 

Then I quickly checked out before I could change my mind. Will have to see which of these, if any, I end up hating.

It can be interesting, and instructive, when a book provokes animosity. It may tell you more about a subject or about yourself, as a reader, than you think you know. It might even, on occasion, challenge you to change your mind.

I want to experience this.

Do you?