How To Read Hard Books And Actually Understand Them

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Oct 30, 2025, 8:31 PM

how to read hard books and actually understand them

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. Leah Rachel von Essen reviews genre-bending fiction for Booklist, and writes regularly as a senior contributor at Book Riot. Her blog While Reading and Walking has over 10,000 dedicated followers over several social media outlets, including Instagram.

She writes passionately about books in translation, chronic illness and bias in healthcare, queer books, twisty SFF, and magical realism and folklore. She was one of a select few bookstagrammers named to NewCity’s Chicago Lit50 in 2022. She is an avid traveler, a passionate fan of women’s basketball and soccer, and a lifelong learner. Twitter: @reading_while We all have those novels that sit there on our shelves, staring us down, too intimidating to pick up and yet they’ve been on our list for years. Reportedly, they’re rewarding, exciting reads, but every time you think about opening one, dread sinks into your stomach.

So how do you get started? That’s what I’m here to help with. Because I’ve thrown myself into a lot of books that were too hard for me, and come out the other side. In my senior year of high school, I decided to read Ulysses by James Joyce solely because my favorite English teacher loved Joyce. With no preparation, no knowledge of references, nothing, I just kind of dove in. I didn’t understand it all, but I finished it, and enjoyed it.

I truly believe that it’s our gatekeeping of the classics, our pressure to take them so intensely seriously, that makes hard books feel so inaccessible, when truthfully, most of us have the capacity to... So, as an expert in the long, twisty, and ambiguous, I’ve brought all my tips, tricks, and mastery to this article to help you jump into that intimidating book on your shelf, or that... Let’s get started! If you can get a copy that you can own and write on, fantastic. If not, invest in a hefty number of post-its, because you’re going to want to write on this book. A lot.

You want to be able to see your notes on the page, to be able to flip through the book and see all your notes as you go. To see, easily, exactly the passage you’re referring to. 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. Have you ever picked up a book you were excited to read, only to find it’s like deciphering an alien language? Picture this: You are holding a dense tome - maybe Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, or Marx’s Das Kapital - and it feels like staring at a locked vault.

The words swirl, the ideas loom like shadowy giants, and you are tempted to ditch it for scrolling social media, a beach read, or a Netflix binge. But what if I told you that you could crack that vault wide open? That you could not only read but understand those intimidating texts - and even enjoy the process? I am here to share the secrets I have honed from wrestling with tough books, from my postgrad studies, where I tackled dense logic texts, to teaching university students how to conquer thinkers like... I have spent years reading complex ideas across fields - physics to metaphysics - and distilling them into lectures and articles that make the obscure accessible. Let’s embark on this adventure together and unlock the art of reading hard books.

Reading a hard book is like planning a heist - you need a strategy. Pre-reading strategies are your recon mission. Start by previewing the book. Flip through the title, subtitle, table of contents, and chapter headings. Skim the introduction and conclusion to grasp the author’s main argument. When I tackled Heidegger’s Being and Time, I scanned the intro to understand his focus on “being” before getting into the text.

Check out summaries or reviews online—Wikipedia or a quick YouTube video can give you a bird’s-eye view. Think of it as scouting the terrain. Next, set a purpose. Ask: Why am I reading this? Is it for a class, personal growth, or to flex your intellectual muscles? Knowing your “why” keeps you focused.

If you are reading Sartre’s Being and Nothingness for a philosophy class, maybe you only need the sections on existentialism, not every word. Finally, choose the right edition. Books like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Machiavelli’s The Prince often have annotated versions with helpful notes. For Hegel, a “Reader’s Guide” can be a lifeline. Pick an edition that feels like a trusted guide, not a cryptic puzzle. 2.

While You Read - Engage Like a Detective Now you are in the thick of it, turning pages and facing dense prose. Active reading techniques keep you sharp. First, read slowly and in small chunks. Don’t try to marathon 50 pages of Heidegger or Marx in one sitting - it’s like sprinting through a swamp. Break it into 5–10 pages, pause, and summarize what you read.

When I read Nietzsche, I would stop after a section to jot down what Zarathustra’s rants meant in my own words. These builds understanding brick by brick. Katie Azevedo July 31, 2023good habits, reading comprehension, study skills If you’re a student of any age, you’re going to read hard books for school. This is a fact of life. But whether you consider yourself a good reader or not, reading hard books will always take more effort and sometimes different approaches than reading other types of books.

In this post, I teach you how to read hard books with 7 strategies. The strategies below will help you get through difficult novels, including non-fiction, fiction, and biographies. Priming is a strategy that involves getting a brief overview of the topic you’ll be reading about before you read it, so that what you read has a place to “stick” in your mind. Why is this important? Because the more you know about a subject, the better you’ll be able to process and understand new information about that subject. Think of it this way: If you’ve eaten an orange before, you’ll have an easier time describing the flavor of a grapefruit the first time you eat a grapefruit.

How To Read Hard Books And Actually Understand Them

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