Officially speaking, I am majoring in English and American Literature. I’ve read plenty of classics in my college and high school classes: The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Frankenstein, The Three Musketeers, A Tale of Two Cities, etc.

But I hated all of those (and many more) assigned novels. I picked fights with my high school teachers about why we had to read the four-hundred-page tangents of pretentious dead white men. Ultimately, I did read the esteemed classics in our syllabuses despite the lure of Internet summaries, but I stewed as I did so.

I am not a fan of anything that can be classified as “literature.” I’m an English major because I like to read, but if there were a way to get out of reading “the greats,” I would take it.

Actually, if it weren’t for the influence of educators desperately trying to make me a well-rounded reader, I would read a lot of young adult fantasy books and nothing written prior to the twentieth century.

My favorite book is a young adult fantasy novel about a heist in an imaginary country. Other YA fantasy favorites include a book about a demon who collects teeth in exchange for wishes and a book about the only non-magical member of a magical mob family. I’m writing a YA fantasy book.

But admitting all that is hard, especially in literary circles. It’s taboo. Liking fantasy as a literature major means you prefer magic tricks and fiery explosions to musings on the meaning of life. Liking young adult books as an adult means you’re childish.

Of course, that’s reductive. Books with magic and explosions can make statements about life and humanity. Books about teenagers can have meaningful messages about growing up, weathering change, and finding one’s place in the world.

But there’s an established hierarchy in the book world. Readers look down on non-readers, but readers also look down on other readers. When your world revolves around books, it’s easy to judge other people by their bookshelves. And if you’re force-fed the idea that only some books matter to humanity in the grand scheme of history, it’s easy to dismiss the books that matter to someone else right now.

But here’s the thing: meaning and substance are subjective. They have nothing to do with how enshrined a book is in the literary canon and everything to do with who each reader is.

Shakespeare has never moved me the way Harry Potter did. I didn’t cry when I finished A Tale of Two Cities—I might have whooped with joy, though—but I did cry after I had to leave the four parallel Londons of V.E. Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic fantasy series. The Hunger Games taught me more about questioning authority and resisting corruption than The Hunchback of Notre Dame did.

Our culture, especially academic culture, promotes the idea that reading a book for entertainment is less valid than reading a book for the opportunity to boast that you have read it. Enjoying a book renders it frivolous.

But the emotional impact of a book is not proportional to how difficult it is to read; being thought-provoking is not the same thing as being headache-inducing.

I don’t remember the content of most classics I’ve reluctantly consumed; all I remember is frustration and boredom. The books that have changed my life have been books I could speed through. I read them fast, without struggling, but they still captivated me for days, months, years after I finished.

I would say that makes them more important—to me, at least—than any so-called literary masterpiece.

But you’re free to disagree, because the beauty of reading is that it is so personal. Different people enjoy different books. And we should celebrate that fact instead of shaming people for it.