You Don’t Hate Reading. You Just Can’t Read.
Most people who say a book bores them are lying. Not on purpose. They're lying to themselves.
Boredom doesn't really exist the way people think it does. It's not a property of a book. It's the absence of stimulation, and only idle people feel it. Someone busy with the rest of their life doesn't stop mid-day and announce they're bored. They don't have the space for it. Boredom shows up when there's nothing pulling your attention forward, and people blame the book for it instead of themselves.
If that were the whole problem, the fix would be easy: read what interests you. Naval Ravikant said it well: "Read what you love until you love what you read." Chase curiosity, not chores.
That advice fails most people who say they can't read, and it fails them for a different reason. Their problem isn't interest. It's ability. Someone reading at a second-grade level opens a novel written for adults, and no amount of personal interest closes that gap. The book might be exactly their kind of story. It won't matter. They can't process the sentences in front of them, because most fiction and non-fiction is written for a reading grade they haven't reached yet.
I know this feeling. Open a calculus textbook with zero background in math, and the page might as well be blank. The words are all there. The meaning isn't. You'd quit after one page too, and it would have nothing to do with your attention span or your discipline. It would be a straightforward mismatch between what's on the page and what you're equipped to read.
This is not a character flaw. It's a solvable gap. If you're reading this essay, you're probably not the person in question. But you likely know one. And the fix for them is the same fix that closes any skill gap: start at the real level, not the wished-for one.
Start with children's books. Watch how many they actually finish, not how many they claim to enjoy. If they read those comfortably, that's their real level today, whether or not they like hearing it. Move up one grade at a time from there, toward wherever most contemporary novels sit. Don't rush the next level until the current one feels easy: vocabulary in place, sentence structures familiar, tone and nuance no longer a guessing game. This takes months, sometimes longer. That's fine. It's supposed to.
Enjoyment has to survive the whole process. It's the only thing that keeps someone showing up to a book instead of a phone. Skip that, and the exercise turns into homework, and homework gets abandoned. The goal isn't just to raise their reading level. It's to raise their comprehension enough that reading stops feeling like work at every stage along the way.
Do this long enough, and something changes. "I can't read" stops being true. What replaces it is more honest: "I don't want to read this one." That's a preference. The first one was an excuse dressed up as a feeling.
Confront someone directly about this and they'll deny it, then accuse you of judging them. That's what a defence mechanism does when you name it out loud. Don't push. Just notice it, and let the reading catch up quietly instead of forcing the admission.
Parents already do this, mostly without thinking about it. A child starts with material built for their reading grade, then moves up a level as they age, and by the time they're adults, the fear of a book is gone. It's why Harry Potter works as well as it does. The first book reads easy on purpose. Each one after gets harder, and the reader grows into the difficulty without noticing the climb.
There's no such thing as a boring book. There's only a book above someone's level, and a person too proud to say so.