deferrance satisfied

The first book I read by James Fenimore Cooper, the main impression I had was how boring it was. It was very earthy and basic, like a cabin in the woods. 

I didn't finish that book even though I had to read it for a course I was doing. Then, later I felt differently about his work. I recognized something of value in it, even if my initial feeling was that it was boring. 

I collect books that I haven't really enjoyed, because of their literary merit. Like Ulysses by James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett's trilogy of novels, and The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, and Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and many others. That sense of literary merit independent of enjoyment or even appreciation, is a value shared by a lot of my books. Sometimes, of course, there's both - enjoyment and literary merit, and I find that literary merit feeds into enjoyment, although not always directly.