Reading “classic” novels in high school seems a waste. I’d not yet had the life experience - or introspection - required to at all grasp what the authors were saying. Classics are deemed so because they capture the human experience; I hadn’t enough years to gather experience.

This is a sort of miscommunication. The author writes to help me construct a model of their insights, ideas, experiences - but my mind does not yet contain the materials they’re using. So I conclude the wrong thing: that these works are boring, that I don’t like literature.

Perhaps if I’d read classics that *did* build from my (admittedly unusual, in America) experiences, I would’ve concluded that writing was a worthwhile activity, and pursued it sooner.