Trying to get into reading and literature but I think my mindset is wonky…any advice?

There’s many different reasons as to why reading is so difficult for me to get into. For context I’m a dude in his mid 20s. I spend a lot of time playing video games or being on Reddit and TikTok or watching anime. I’ve a mountain of unread books because the ideas all sound really cool to me and I see a promise of something that will benefit me from absorbing the contents of various books.

I notice I always have this feeling that I have to complete the book quickly. I’m a slow reader I think. Oftentimes I’m rereading paragraphs constantly and it’s very irritating. My experience is also fragmented since I’m constantly having to look up words that I won’t even see until 3 chapters later and I’ve forgotten it so gotta look it up again and again. I don’t have to do this with other mediums I enjoy. It’s frustrating as I feel like I’m struggling to wring the results out of the book. It takes forever. I can go on a crazy journey in a couple hours watching a show or movie or playing a game. But a couple hours in a book for me is one scene and then a monologue about it.

It almost feels like a waste of time unless I’m engaging something academic. In the end yes whether or not it’s a movie or a book I’m investing time into fiction but it just takes forever to reap what I sow when it comes to books.

Also, with books - specifically novels, it’s so hard for me to feel things. I can certainly imagine things that I read but mostly it just feels like a thought stream of words. While with something that is more image based just seeing a person’s face delivers emotion in a way that doesn’t even seem comparable to reading a two page section of a person describing how they feel and what is doing that. It’s like… I read fiction like a textbook. Idk what to do about that. I desperately want to be able to feel from a book. The most I get is a slight anxiety that makes me have to cover the next page to prevent myself from looking over at it for a resolution to a conflict on the present page.

Then there’s like… higher literature I guess? Absolutely laced in metaphor or references or weird ways of speaking that you have to do research on and by the time I get an answer the emotion has been absolutely sapped out of the words. It’s all just a struggle between vocab and history. Like I tried reading poetry the other day and didn’t understand it so looked up stuff and by the time I understood it I just didn’t care anymore.

Or some books just waylay you with all these names and places and countries you have to memorize and I’d have to make a spreadsheet to remember anything. Especially in fantasy novels with very wonky names I can barely pronounce.

Idk is this all normal? Is there a way to get past it? How can I feel emotion from this stuff? How can I stop getting frustrated that so little has happened within the story in hours of reading? How can I remember things better? How can I enjoy research and analyzing stuff to death and then enjoying reading the analyzed-to-death stuff like you guys?