Like any good art, O’Connor requires careful study if it is to be experienced as the writer intended.
Many people are put off by art (literature, classical music, the plastic arts, etc.) because they are expecting a “surface” experience — i.e. entertainment, an emotion-driven process. Real art is not entertainment. Real art is “deep”; It requires the full intellectual attention of the reader, viewer, or listener in order to function as art. Give Flannery O’Connor your undivided attention and you will be pleased with the result.
And you needen’t wait for your daughter to lend you a copy of O’Connor. Her works are to be found at any public library.
I might also suggest the works of that greatest of all novelists (in my opinion), the incomparable Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Any time invested in his dense, convoluted works will pay a rich dividend later, leaving the reader esthetically, intellectually, and spiritually better off.
I’m smack dab in the middle of David McCullough’s “John Adams” right now. Flannery’s gonna have to wait because we just discovered John LeCarre’s first George Smiley novel. We LOVE George, and had already read “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” and “Smiley’s People”. I didn’t even know that LeCarre had written one before “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold”.