How to Read a Difficult Book Without Giving Up

Most people who abandon a difficult book do so for reasons that have nothing to do with capability. The book was read in the wrong order, at the wrong pace, or in the wrong edition.

Read the introduction last

Scholarly introductions are written for people who have finished the book. They summarise the argument, assume the vocabulary, and frequently give away the shape of the thing before you have any purchase on it.

Read the text first. The introduction is a much better essay once you know what it is about.

Do not start at page one of everything

Books that are collections — notebooks, essays, aphorisms — have no obligatory order. Meditations is the obvious example: Book One is a list of acknowledgements and is the worst possible entry point.

Find where the book actually starts arguing and begin there.

Read short and often

Dense text does not reward long sessions. Twenty minutes a day gets further into a hard book over a month than one three-hour attempt, because comprehension degrades with fatigue much faster than with unfamiliarity.

For aphoristic works, two pages is a genuine reading session.

Mark the book

Underline, bracket, write in the margin. If it is your copy, the resistance to marking it is sentiment rather than practicality, and a marked book is enormously more useful on a second pass.

A simple system is enough: line for important, question mark for did not follow, star for come back.

Keep a two-line summary per section

At the end of each chapter, write two lines in your own words. If you cannot, you did not follow it — which is useful to know immediately rather than sixty pages later.

This takes a minute and roughly doubles what you retain.

Give yourself permission to skip

Skipping a chapter you are bogged down in is far better than abandoning the book. Come back to it. Many difficult books become easier once you have the vocabulary from later sections.

Change the edition rather than the ambition

If a book is genuinely impenetrable, the translation or the edition is frequently the problem, and switching is not defeat. A clear modern rendering read completely beats a scholarly one abandoned on page thirty.

This is why we name the translator and the apparatus on every edition we list.

One thing worth remembering

Difficult books were written by people trying to be understood. Where a text is opaque, that is usually distance — of time, of language, of assumed knowledge — rather than the author being clever at you.

Ask us if you get stuck. We have read most of what is on the shelf.

All notes

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