Improve at what? Pretentiousness?

Book people really hate to hear it, but literary fiction follows Sturgeon's law just as much as Sturgeon's own genre. 90% of it isn't worth reading, and that includes 90% of what's fashionable at any given time. You're better off reading books you enjoy than suffering through garbage that you're told you're a bad person if you don't read.

(Literary fiction isn't bad. But for the love of reading, skip anything new and fashionable until enough decades go by for the influnce of fashion to fade. And skip things that aren't enjoyable to actually read.)

Improve at the ability to read, understand, and digest higher literature.

I am in complete agreement with you that 99% of books are crap. It's the 1% that you hopefully want to get around to reading, and those are typically not the easiest reads.