When Reading Is Difficult Aim Higher

I've had a hard time reading lately. My mind races a thousand miles an hour until I lay down in bed and open a book then my eyes lids become sandbags and sleep the curtain. Brought down with an unflattering flourish of drool.
I've read:
- about half of Henry Miller's The Air Conditioned Nightmare - boring, no real narrative
- reread Hemingway's A Clean, Well-Lighted Place - awesome...makes more sense every five years or so when I reread it
- the first looooong chapter of Freethinkers by Susan Jacoby - okay but between the recent biographies of Roosevelt, Lincoln, and Jackson I need a break from history
- maybe a chapter of Return To Wild America - an aging bird watcher talking about watching birds...an AARP ad
- 1/3 of Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse - a bit depressing and a bit too theater of the absurd for my liking
- The Norton critical guide to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land - a difficult poem and I hope to find the point of it all in the contemporary critical essays in this book.
But now, yesterday I settled on As I Lay Dying by Wm Faulkner. Excellent book. I'm 50 pages into and will finish it. Published in 1930, the book was written in six weeks while Faulkner worked at a power plant. This is the novel after his magnum opus, The Sound And The Fury. Faulkner is a writer one has to work up to. He is a challange, sort of like a sublime (or grotesque) John Steinbeck, but his characters are outstanding. This is the 3rd of his books I've read.