[gumby]

> much of a student’s college experience is reading uninteresting things.

Wait, what?? That was certainly not my experience, and judging by the barrage of texts I get from my now college-attending child, isn't his experience either.

He did find a lot of what he was given in his California high school was boring. Enrolling in it was a bit of a shock after his prior experience.

[jaredklewis]

Reading is often boring when the text is not of interest to the reader. Perhaps it depends on your major and so on, but as a former English major I would find it extraordinary for someone to go 4 years of college and never read any text they weren’t interested in. Not to say that any of the books I read in college were bad, but taste is a thing. Just because something has won a Pulitzer Prize or whatever doesn’t mean it will be equally interesting to all people.

[projektir]

Pretty much every "recognized" book I've read was interesting in some way or another. I might have disliked it, or disagreed with it, but it surely wasn't boring. I used to find lots of books boring when I had no idea how to read them. Especially older works require context to read them in. You have to figure out why you are.

Another thing is that a book may not be worth the investment, but that's a different category. I don't really want to read War and Peace or Infinite Jest, but I doubt they're boring. I'll just get more enjoyment bang for my buck out of reading my preferred genre, but if I had to read them for professional reasons (I consider college such) it wouldn't be an issue.

> taste is a thing

Taste is a very, very overblown thing. It's often used as a strict thing, set in stone, and giving full carte blanche to ignore lots of works or people. But in reality it's very flippant and malleable and often developed out of sheer chance.

You'll find that people who don't read at all have no taste for any book.

[yorwba]

I'm studying CS and don't even look at textbooks until I'm doing a problem set and realize that I don't yet know enough to solve it. In most cases, I just need to look up a definition. Then I can search for the relevant passage and read just that, which doesn't feel boring because I have a clear goal.

Of course that strategy doesn't work if you're asked to "read this book and write about it" (Obviously, I have no idea what an English major is like.), but when it's applicable, postponing reading until you have an immediate reason to do it helps me a lot to avoid boredom.