A Note On Reading Big Difficult Books Read Write Collect

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Oct 31, 2025, 3:47 AM

a note on reading big difficult books read write collect

You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone. Anubis is a compromise. Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam. The idea is that at individual scales the additional load is ignorable, but at mass scraper levels it adds up and makes scraping much more expensive. Ultimately, this is a hack whose real purpose is to give a "good enough" placeholder solution so that more time can be spent on fingerprinting and identifying headless browsers (EG: via how they do...

Please note that Anubis requires the use of modern JavaScript features that plugins like JShelter will disable. Please disable JShelter or other such plugins for this domain. This website is running Anubis version v1.21.0-pre1. Is there a book that you want to read but scares you? It’s too long, or too technically demanding, or its subject matter is challenging — is there such a book on your virtual or physical bookshelf? I have several such books waiting to be read.

I also make a point to read several such books each year. They’re nearly always worth the effort. Goodreads and its annual reading challenge make readers favour short, quick reads, skim reading and light reading. This is not by chance, but this isn’t a post about the failures of Goodreads as a platform. This is a post about reading difficult books, and the point is that if you want to challenge yourself you’re going to have to make a concerted effort on your own. You will have to motivate yourself because reading platforms and book clubs skew towards books that can be read quickly and relatively easily, and we’re being trained daily to shorten our attention span and...

To read difficult books is to go against the grain, to retrain your mind to deep, meaningful thought, to long stretches of concentration, to a higher level of empathy. It’s the difference between a fast food burger and an evening with a 3 star Michelin chef showing off his best work. It’s worth it, but it costs more. If you chose to go on that challenging but worthwhile journey, here are some tips to help you along the way: It seems obvious why textbooks are hard to read. The material is dense; there’s a lot of information packed into relatively few words.

Authors often feel obligated to give you a broad, complete understanding of a topic rather than to weave an interesting story from selected details. Teachers are ready to assign a textbook, even if it’s boring; it’s seen as a regrettable but unavoidable problem. But there’s a more subtle reason that it’s hard to stay engaged when you read a textbook. To find out why, read this paragraph, one you might find in a typical high school textbook. The Manhattan Project was the United States’ effort to produce a nuclear weapon, and it was the largest construction enterprise in the history of science. Because of its sensitive nature, a massive effort was made to keep the project secret.

Famous scientists traveled under aliases; Enrico Fermi was known as Henry Farmer, for instance. And all telephone conversations at the test sites were monitored. Despite those efforts, historians agree that it probably would have been impossible to keep the secret if not for the fact that the project was of relatively small size. Did you notice that the last sentence contradicted the first? Embedding a mistake or contradiction into a text and seeing whether readers notice it is a common research technique to measure comprehension. Readers are asked to judge each text on how well it’s written and explain their rating.

Readers are very likely to notice a word they don’t know. They are also very likely to notice if the grammar of a sentence is wrong. But they are much less likely to notice when two sentences contradict each other. Forty percent of high school students missed the contradiction in the paragraph above. To put it another way, if readers simply understand each sentence on its own, they figure they are doing what they’re supposed to do. Jeremy Anderberg • September 3, 2019 • Last updated: October 28, 2025

In the last year, I’ve managed to finish a number of lengthy, sometimes hard-to-read books. Ron Chernow’s 900+ page tome on George Washington. 600+ dense pages on James Madison. Andrew Roberts’ massive biography of Winston Churchill. (Yes, I’m into biographies.) A couple of Dickens’ novels — they’re all big. Melville’s American masterpiece, Moby-Dick.

Robert Caro’s legendary, epic series on Lyndon Johnson. And most recently, all 1,400+ pages of Les Miserables. Even though these books were enjoyable, and I had a genuine interest in the subject matter, they were often hard to read, if for no other reason than their sheer volume. Large pages, small fonts, tiny margins. Les Mis, because of its actual weight, had to be read sitting up, and often in a chair with an armrest because the thing was so dang heavy and unwieldy. (While I could have read an e-version, as I’ll explain below, I often prefer hardbound copies of classics, even if they’re harder to wrangle.)

While Hugo and Dickens are a delight to read, the reality is that their language is so different from today that it takes brain power to really digest. And while those biographies I mentioned aren’t necessarily old, they are dense with facts, especially when you’re new to that person/time period. They’re just intimidating for folks who aren’t used to that type of reading which requires sustained focus and a bit of endurance. Before the last year or so, I would have probably counted myself in that camp. I had tried to read Washington: A Life and gave up after a few hundred pages. I’d tried Moby-Dick and met a similar fate.

The allure of a big, meaty book was great, and yet I couldn’t find the stamina to actually finish many. When I first started reading non-fiction, I would only read books on self-help. I read obsessively, applied everything I could, and saw significant improvements in my life. But by the tenth self-help book, I hit a massive reading slump. Everything sounded the same—just repackaged ideas with different authors, titles, and covers. Consequently, I no longer felt motivated or excited to read, and I convinced myself I had learned everything I could possibly know.

One day, desperate to feel inspired again, I went to the bookstore. I browsed the self-help section first, but nothing stood out. So I kept wandering through the different sections: first psychology, then business, neuroscience, and economics. As I weaved my way through various genres, wanting to read almost every book I encountered, it hit me: I had exhausted one subject but still knew nothing about countless others. Suddenly, the slump disappeared. I wasn’t bored or uninspired anymore.

Instead, I was now overwhelmed by how much I didn’t know and all the subjects I wanted to explore. Despite wanting to take nearly every book home with me, I decided to be a responsible shopper and buy just one. I chose Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, a nearly 500-page book on behavioral economics. I had no background in the subject, but I gave it a shot anyway. It wasn’t exactly beginner-friendly — dense with research and terminology that felt complex to me at the time — but I pushed through. I’ve read my fair share of the heavyweights.

From Plutarch to Proust, Conrad to Camus, and Dante to Dostoyevsky. I used to struggle with the “greats”. After a few pages, I’d close the book with a headache and poor sense of self-worth. Was I stupid? Maybe I needed to return to Dr. Seuss and retake my entire literary education…

Well, I wasn’t stupid. I was just approaching these books the wrong way. Big difficult books remain inaccessible to most people for a reason: they require a unique set of reading tools and a completely foreign approach to reading. Unless you’ve dedicated a lot of time to tackling these works and managed to make it through the frustration, you probably don’t know exactly what is needed to appreciate them. That’s because no one ever tells you. But I’m going to tell you right now so you can dive right in and start enjoying the big once-formidable classics.

Here are the tips that I have learned through years of trial-and-error and stumbling through the classics. Follow this approach and you will be able to knock quite a few hefty volumes off your book bucket list. You’ll actually enjoy them and remember them too! Don’t rush to consume big difficult texts. You aren’t stretched out on a sun lounger thumbing through the latest Jackie Collins. You’re reading Thoreau or Shakespeare or Homer.

This is work. And you need to do your work properly. No half-assed jobs here. In our modern era of instant information and bite-sized entertainment, reading intellectually challenging material can seem like an unnecessary burden. Why struggle through a dense classic novel, a difficult philosophical treatise, or an intricate historical account when easier, more accessible options are available? However, those who embrace the challenge of “hard books” often find their intellectual lives enriched in ways that lighter reading simply cannot provide.

A Note On Reading Big Difficult Books Read Write Collect

People Also Search

You Are Seeing This Because The Administrator Of This Website

Please Note That Anubis Requires The Use Of Modern JavaScript

I Also Make A Point To Read Several Such Books

To Read Difficult Books Is To Go Against The Grain,

Authors Often Feel Obligated To Give You A Broad, Complete