Ben Greenman's Dilemma

Ben Greenman's dilemma is one with which I am intimately familiar:

One afternoon at the bookstore I picked up Nikos Kazantzakis' The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, a thirty-thousand-line poem that imagines Odysseus's adventures
after he leaves the Homeric universe. It was the largest book on the table by far. It felt like a brick that, if thrown, could shatter the windows and let the light come in. I held it up. "You sure?" my mother said. "You'll never read it."
The book came home. It went on the shelf. It stayed there. At first it was a challenge. Two months later, it was black comedy. Two months after that, it was an embarrassment. I blamed the victim: it was too thick, too dense, too much. I went off to college. Graduated. Got a job. Got a girlfriend. One summer on the telephone my father told me that my parents had decided to sell the house. "We need you to come down and help pack," my mother said. Read all about it...