Why Are We Reading This Book

So in class we having been reading "Song of Solomon" by Toni Morrison.  The first thing that comes to my head after reading the first chapter is that this book is very very weird.  The main scene that caused this thought is the breastfeeding scene where Ruth breastfeeds her son who is much too old to perform this action.  When we were asked to analyze this scene, we were told to mainly look at the line that said "It was as though she were a cauldron issuing spinning gold."  From this line we made a connection to the story of "Rumpelstiltskin" in which an entity of unknown origin grants a woman the ability to spin straw into gold in exchange for her firstborn child.  To be honest, I still don't understand how the story of Rumpelstiltskin connects with "Song of  Solomon," but I never really liked "Rumpelstiltskin."  The beginning of the story is good and creates a nice conflict but the conflict is then resolved in an unsatisfactory way when a random soldier of the king overhears Rumpelstiltskin speaking his name which allows the woman to gain power over the entity and gain the rights to her child back.  Similar to how I feel that this story has little connection to the novel that we are reading, many of the events just within the first chapter of the novel seem only loosely connected with each other.  We start off with a man jumping off a hospital and committing possibly accidental suicide.  Then we start talking about how a street got its name and then into the backstory of many different people, some of which are related.  These events are shown so randomly that it makes the novel seem very disconnected even though all I have experienced so far is reading one chapter.