Keep in mind that when I say peer pressure I include myself as a peer. I want to be the type of person that reads books like these. Make sense?

I recall one. I read The Virginian by Owen Wister. I had tried reading a Louis L'Amour book before and it was just kinda meh. That was when I was a younger teenager and my identity was still fluid so reading a western wasn't a stretch. I probably never would have read another western again as they just didn't fit my idea of entertaining reading. My idea of myself allowed for sci-fi, the harder the better, lots of non-fiction and eventually "the classics."

I stumbled across this book by Owen Wister on somebody's essential "classics" reading list and so I picked it up. It turns out I love it! It didn't turn me onto westerns though. Those two are the only two I've read and it seems unlikely that I'll read more.

It's funny too - knowing this about people, and about myself, doesn't bother me overmuch. It's true that I'm probably missing out on many things that I'd like because I consider them part of some other culture. But then, there isn't enough time in the world to sample everything anyways. We have to have some sort of criteria to narrow it down, don't we? Even limiting myself to those categories above I'll never exhaust my potential reading list.

Off the topic of books but on the topic of what OP wrote - I have lately found a lot of modern musical artists that I absolutely love when I had nearly entirely given up on all modern music. I thought pop was dead to me. I thought I just couldn't hear soul music right. I thought folk was dead. I couldn't get jazz at all. And yet today I listen to Kimbra, Lana Del Rey, Of Monsters and Men, and so on. I'll never buy a Taylor Swift album but eventually I just had to know what everyone was talking about. She's good! She makes good music! It isn't my style, it isn't in the 'culture' that I've chosen, but I can't deny the quality.

With Taylor Swift though. I had to sort of make myself do it. It was about curiosity. While listening to her I could not shake the idea that even if I liked this, this wasn't for me. I think those kind of thoughts are what the sociologists are studying.