How to Read and Understand Difficult Books

One of the most important lessons I've learned about reading hard books is that you can't read them the same way you read regular books.

Now, that may seem like a really obvious statement, but I think that's a pretty common misconception.

It's this idea that it mostly comes down to effort.

You sit down, start on page one, maybe take some notes, but you just keep pushing yourself through until you get to the end, and that's all there is to it.

But this kind of thinking overlooks the fact that books are difficult for different reasons, and we're gonna talk about what some of those reasons are here in just a minute.

But you can't approach them all the same way because every book requires something different from us as readers, uh, a different level of attention or different strategies.

So in this video, I'm gonna walk you through a simple process that anyone can use to read those books that might otherwise feel a bit intimidating to pick up.

So the first thing I try to do is identify exactly what it is that's making the book difficult, and you can usually narrow this down to four or five main reasons.

The first is structure.

Basically, this is how the book is organized or how the ideas build on each other.

Some books are written in a way where the ideas or the arguments are typically explained slowly, uh, sometimes across multiple sections or across multiple chapters.

And you often need ideas from later in the book to fully understand what you read earlier.

So even though the book is laid out in sort of a linear fashion, your understanding of it isn't linear, and it feels difficult mainly because of the way it's organized.

Here, I'm thinking of a book like The Theory of Justice by John Rawls.

Uh, I've been working on this one for a really long time.

Uh, it's been a huge challenge for me because Rawls builds arguments slowly, uh, throughout the book, and he often uses ideas that often don't make sense until much later.

So a book like this is particularly difficult because you can read every sentence and still not understand earlier parts until you've seen the whole structure.

Another issue could be the language.

If the writing is dense or technical or just stylistically difficult, uh, maybe the sentences are long or the vocabulary is unfamiliar.

The author is using abstract language that kind of slows everything down.

In that case, the difficulty is happening at the level of prose.

A really good example of this is Ulysses by James Joyce.

He uses unconventional sentence structures, and there are frequent shifts in style and stream of consciousness.

Even simple scenes are kind of hard to work out sometimes because of how they're written.

And then there's conceptual difficulty.

One of the most important lessons I've learned about reading hard books is that you can't read them the same way you read regular books.

Now, that may seem like a really obvious statement, but I think that's a pretty common misconception.

It's this idea that it mostly comes down to effort.

You sit down, start on page one, maybe take some notes, but you just keep pushing yourself through until you get to the end, and that's all there is to it.

But this kind of thinking overlooks the fact that books are difficult for different reasons, and we're gonna talk about what some of those reasons are here in just a minute.

But you can't approach them all the same way because every book requires something different from us as readers, uh, a different level of attention or different strategies.

So in this video, I'm gonna walk you through a simple process that anyone can use to read those books that might otherwise feel a bit intimidating to pick up.

So the first thing I try to do is identify exactly what it is that's making the book difficult, and you can usually narrow this down to four or five main reasons.

The first is structure.

Basically, this is how the book is organized or how the ideas build on each other.

Some books are written in a way where the ideas or the arguments are typically explained slowly, uh, sometimes across multiple sections or across multiple chapters.

And you often need ideas from later in the book to fully understand what you read earlier.

So even though the book is laid out in sort of a linear fashion, your understanding of it isn't linear, and it feels difficult mainly because of the way it's organized.

Here, I'm thinking of a book like The Theory of Justice by John Rawls.

Uh, I've been working on this one for a really long time.

Uh, it's been a huge challenge for me because Rawls builds arguments slowly, uh, throughout the book, and he often uses ideas that often don't make sense until much later.

So a book like this is particularly difficult because you can read every sentence and still not understand earlier parts until you've seen the whole structure.

Another issue could be the language.

If the writing is dense or technical or just stylistically difficult, uh, maybe the sentences are long or the vocabulary is unfamiliar.

The author is using abstract language that kind of slows everything down.

In that case, the difficulty is happening at the level of prose.

A really good example of this is Ulysses by James Joyce.

He uses unconventional sentence structures, and there are frequent shifts in style and stream of consciousness.

Even simple scenes are kind of hard to work out sometimes because of how they're written.

And then there's conceptual difficulty.