A possible question for your excellent literary chat threads:

Which books did you hesitate to read for a long time, and why?

I once recommended to a friend that he read Crime and Punishment, telling him that it would change his life; he said he didn’t want his life changed. There have been a few books which I didn’t want to read because I thought that they would affect my thinking in ways which I wasn’t yet ready to embrace; there have been other books which I didn’t read because I didn’t think I would be able to appreciate them at the particular life stage I was in at the time.

Who else has had such experiences?