OK, so I'm trying to become Veeky Forums. I learned to read at six. (Unusually late here), after that I read a book a week, or more for the next 6 years, until I hit puberty, and got internet access. In the last year, I've read no books the full way through. (I've started literally hundreds, but rarely make it to even the second chapter). I was raised on shit like Enid Blyton, Harry Potter, and Darren Shan. While I don't regret reading any of those, this, combined with the fact that in the last five years I've read less than ten books the whole way through. (L'Etranger by Albert Camus, What If? by Randall Munroe, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, TFIOS by John Green are the only ones that I can remember). I apologise for reading TFIOS. In hindsight, that was uber-plebian of me. I refuse to apologise for enjoying Hitchhiker's though. It's funny, and that's clearly all that it's trying to be.
Anyway, the end result of all this is that when I tried to read Sartre's Nausea recently, I couldn't understand what I was reading. Not because it dealt with complex themes or anything, it's just that the sentence structure, and vocabulary alone was enough to render me completely incapable of absorbing the meaning of the words before me.
My question is, do any of you have any fucking idea what I'm supposed to do in order to improve my basic reading ability enough that I can move onto anything even remotely highbrow? And don't say "Start with the Greeks." I fucking tried that. I had the exact same problem with Homer as I did with Sartre, and found myself rereading the same line over, and over again trying to figure out what the fuck I just read. I just couldn't. What the fuck is wrong with me? I tried reading Pseudo-Apollodorus's Bibliotecha, and the lists of ancestors went on for so long that my eyes glazed over, I went lightheaded, and I began to feel queazy, and couldn't focus for shit, because everytime that I realised this was happening, I would try to go back to the page, and the exact same thing would repeat, and it's not just the Bibliotequa this happens with, it's a lot of shit. I tried forgoing the myth, and skipping straight to Plato, and I couldn't keep track of who was speaking, or when, or what the point that they were trying to get across was.
WHAT CAN I READ IN ORDER TO BE ABLE TO READ PROPERLY AGAIN? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD! I'm not asking how to develop good taste or greater insight here, I just want to be able to read a book from start to finish without zoning out, and staring at the walls for thirty minutes and the end of each paragraph that I actual finish, while the majority of them, I just stare at in desperation because the words on the page don't translate into meaning in my brain. Help.