I got a kick out of this, from Ian Crouch at The New Yorker Blog. I recognized myself, having come to the bottom of the last page--". . . and yes I said yes I will Yes" (I just looked it up; all I really remembered is that the last word is "Yes")--of Joyce's Ulysses as Crouch concludes:
Part of my suspicion of rereading may come from a false sense of reading as a conquest. As we polish off some classic text, we may pause for a moment to think of ourselves, spear aloft, standing with one foot up on the flank of the slain beast. Another monster bagged.
Joyce, it should be noted, said, on being asked what kind of readers he hoped for: "The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works." The interviewer, Max Eastman, allowed that Joyce smiled as he said this--"smiled, and then repeated it." So he expected more than I had given him while mentally flexing over the carcass of his great work. I don't remember much of it now. I remember reading that Lionel Trilling said it was a great novel partly because it was the first time in the history of literature that the "hero" had sniffed his own toe jam but I do not remember reading that scene in the book.
One aspect of the case Crouch does not delve into concerns the fact that hardly anyone reads good books anymore except when assigned to by literature professors, and there is a conspiracy among them to make thoughtlessness mandatory. I remember taking a course called "Philosophical Ideas in Literature" during the interim term--basically, the month of January--while a college student. The reading list consisted of Moby-Dick, Notes from Underground, The Brothers Karamazov, Brand, Peer Gynt, Time Must Have a Stop, The Stranger, and The Wasteland. In a month! I'm probably forgetting part of the syllabus, too. If you slept six hours per night and went to the movies on Saturday, you'd be challenged just to turn all the pages in one month, let alone permit your eye to pass over the words.
On the general question of what to read, my only advice has already been offered by (I think) Simone Weil: "Read only what you hunger for, because then you don't read: you eat."
Maybe everyone is already taking her advice. It would explain why no one reads good books.