Structuring Your Way Through a Difficult Book - What to Settle Before You Give Up

Stalling at Page Thirty

You bought a highly regarded book. You start reading. Within a few pages you notice that what is written is not entering your head. You go back and read it again. You lose the thread again.

Around page thirty you close the book and set it on the desk. A few days later you have started a different book.

Repeat this experience and you arrive at the conclusion that you cannot read difficult books. What is actually happening, though, is a blockage caused by starting to read without designing how you would read.

Do You Have to Understand All of It?

The first premise to drop is the condition that you must understand everything written.

The content of a difficult book is what the author thought through over a long stretch of time. If you could understand all of it on a first read, the book would not be difficult. Parts remaining unclear means the book's level of difficulty is as expected.

And people who read specialist works and classics do not understand all of it either. Pick up the parts you can follow, mark the parts you cannot, and move on. This way of reading is the standard. Watching where your own understanding breaks off has a name, Metacognition, and it is the skill actually at work when someone reads a hard book well.

Impose the condition of understanding everything and you cannot get past page one. You stop at what you do not understand, look it up, go back, stop again. Repeat that and the first chapter takes days, and your energy runs out there.

Drop the condition and the way you move changes. You may pass over what you do not understand. You may come back later. You may never come back.

Settle the Purpose of the Read First

The next thing to settle is what you want to get from the book. The purpose changes how you read.

If you want to know the overall argument, you can skip the details. Read the introduction and the conclusion, plus the opening and closing of each chapter, and you have the skeleton of the argument.

If you want to verify a specific point, go straight to the relevant place from the table of contents. There is no need to read from the front.

If you want to take on the author's way of thinking, close reading is required. In this case, proceed chapter by chapter on the premise that it will take time.

If you want to read it through as general education, prioritize finishing over depth of understanding. Skip what you do not understand and make reaching the end your target.

Without a purpose settled, you cannot choose any of these ways of reading. Stalling because you tried to read all of it closely is the result of not having settled a purpose.

The Option of Not Reading in Order

With a difficult book, reading straight through from the front is not necessarily best.

In many academic books, a summary of the whole sits in the introduction. Read it and you know where the chapters that follow are heading. Knowing the destination before entering the details keeps you from getting lost.

Reading the conclusion first also works. Reading the body while knowing where the author lands lets you see where each argument sits. It is a way of reading to avoid with detective fiction, but it works for expository books.

A translator's afterword and the endnotes are also worth reading first. With translated works especially, the afterword sometimes states where the book sits and how to read it.

And there is the option of choosing chapters. Read only the three chapters out of twelve that touch on your interest. As long as you do not treat unread chapters as an incomplete task, this method yields a sufficient harvest.

Reading With Your Hands Moving

The sensation that nothing goes in even as you read has something to do with reading being a passive act. It is the same reason Learning Science keeps finding that retrieving and writing leave more behind than rereading does.

Move your hands and the way you process changes. Here are several methods.

• Write a one-line summary of each chapter: For a chapter you have finished, put what was said into one line. If you cannot write it, you know your understanding is short
• Write out your questions: Put what you did not understand into the form of a question. It becomes something to look into later, and even if left alone it remains as a record
• Substitute your own examples: Apply an abstract argument to a concrete case you know. If you can apply it, you understand it
• Tell someone: Explain what you read to another person. Where the explanation stalls is where your understanding breaks off

All of these take time. But they actually leave something, unlike stacking up time spent reading and forgetting.

And give yourself permission to slow down. There is no need to read a difficult book fast. Ten pages a day reaches a thousand pages in a hundred days.

The Judgment to Step Off Partway

Finally, a word about the option of not reading it through.

There is no rule that a book you have started must be read to the end. What tends to hold you there is the Sunk Cost Fallacy: grudging the money and hours already spent, you keep reading a book you have established does not suit you. A book that does not suit you, a book that is early for who you are, a book whose content differed from what you expected. In every case it is fine to stop partway.

As markers for the decision to stop, there are these. You have read fifty pages and no interest in the content has arisen. Reading it has become an obligation. There are other books you want to read, and this one has brought your reading to a halt.

A book you stopped is one you can come back to. Reread it years later and passages that were opaque at the time can become readable. Either your foundational knowledge grew or your interests changed. In many cases the time for reading it simply had not arrived.

Considering how to recover after giving up together with how to build the habit of reading itself, it becomes clear that the state of continuing to read matters more than finishing one volume. Reading a difficult book is not the work of subduing that book. Receive what you can receive and leave the rest for the next occasion. Start with that stance and you can get past the first thirty pages.