I find it extremely difficult to enjoy reading any fiction that consists of nothing but words. It's not that I don't find the story interesting or believable. I constantly consider if I should finally read the goddamn Harry Potter books that everyone seems to uphold as transcendent masterpieces of children's literature. But there's one thing that's always prevented me from reading this or any other fictional series: I get very anxious that I'm somehow not comprehending the story correctly, or not visualizing a described scene how the author intended.

I keep thinking "So, wait, is this how the author intended readers to visualize this scene?" and I start bombarding myself asking questions like "If I don't visualize this specific room correctly, how will I be able to understand what's going on if the author chooses to use that room to forward the plot when I'm further into the book?"

"Am I the only reader who doesn't understand what the hell's going on right now, or have I somehow skipped over something mentioned earlier on in the story?"

"Is this book just written badly, or am I just making this more complicated than it has to be?"

These anxieties, and others, detract from my ability to emphasize with any of the characters to the point I don't feel motivated to care about the situations they find themselves.

For example: I'm trying to visualize how a certain character looks like based on the descriptions given in the novel. When I'm finally confident this character has "blue eyes and blonde hair" based on the context clues in the story, I get to a point where the same character has to "pull out a black strand of their hair." Now I'm wondering "Hold on, was there some scene previously in the book where they dyed their hair and I just forgot about it? Is the author trying to get some detail past me to foreshadow some shocking plot twist?" and then I spend the next twenty minutes going back through the book to figure out how the hell this happened or if it was ever specified what their hair color was to begin with.

And, from the books I managed to finish in the past (mostly for class assignments where I had no other choice) I couldn't describe a certain scene in any meaningful detail if I was asked, while everyone else around me were able to make these connections to other parts of the book that seemed obvious to everyone else except me. Sometimes it gets bad enough that people start accusing me of having not read the book and that I just looked online for a quick summary.

I don't have dyslexia or any related reading disorder. I can read just fine, but I'm just not a very confident reader whatsoever is the problem. I can read nonfiction fine because there's already a basis which the book's working off, like a historical event or objective laws of nature we rely upon throughout our daily lives.

So, hearing all this, how do I get past my anxiety and actually begin to read the story in the book and not just the words in the book itself? How do I know I'm giving a story a fair chance if I end up not liking it when everyone else does?

(EDIT: Grammar)