I could never dream of such nuance.

One of the many curious things you learn in calculus is that "infinity" is not exactly a single thing: that, yes, a set of things can be infinite, but infinite sets can have different "cardinalities," and with some straightforward (as these things go) math, in some calculus situations you can algebraically cancel out infinities the same way you might cancel out the n in 5n/n. In an ordinary everyday life, you'd never know the difference.

I have learned many subtleties in the world of boring bedtime literature. There are different ways to be boring! And they are not alike.

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

• Here we have sentences, actually quite pithy by later standards, but still of considerable length, which do the reader no favors as s/he tries to untangle where Gibbon has been superseded by actual archeology, where his observations are still illuminating, and where he (unaccountably to modern eyes) suffers as both a scholar and commentator from assuming the Bible is historically accurate and not presenting any good theories as to why the entire ancient world failed to notice the flood of miracles leading up and including the Crucifixion, which encourages in the modern reader the sense that, while our ways of understanding history are always improving, at the very least Gibbon deserved to be supplanted by the slavering hordes of archeology, geology, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, textual criticism, physics, and chemistry.

Moby-Dick

• I hope you're interested in ships, whale biology, and ships that hunted and skinned whales, because there are very, very long and detailed interludes on all that, and more. And others less interesting. Although, there are no ships until 25% through the book. Before that, you're treated to a long-form essay about the pulpit in the Seamans' Chapel. (Not its symbolism or significance. Just the pulpit.)
• An over-indulgent pot-smoker whose rambling self-monologues every so often deliver an hour of genuine brilliance.

Paradise Lost

• It is 3 AM. You have been driving for 17 hours. Jamie wouldn't have called if it weren't a real emergency; you pray to gods you don't believe in that the trouble isn't the cartel again. 
• Hundreds of square miles of corn and soybeans, punctuated by the occasional farmhouse or rest stop.
• Your muscles twitch with accumulated coffee and Adderall, but you are lulled by the metronome thunking of the expansion joints in the pavement.
• Nebraska has come for you.