India, May 31 -- Dear Reader,

Do you find some prize-winning novels hard to read?

Like One Hundred Years of Solitude? I was eighteen years old and staying in my uncle's house, taking Delhi Transport Corporation buses to Delhi University and standing in long lines for admission to college, when I began reading this much-beloved book of magical realism. I'd read a page or two and put it away.

This carried on for days. I think there was too much going on in my life at that time. But somehow, it made me feel like a failure-this inability to read a book the world was raving about.

Over the years, I gathered evidence. I'd read Beloved by Toni Morrison a few years before. Spending evenings alone in a tiny studio apartment on a cobbled street...