Why Reading Hard Books Is Important Despite How Difficult It Can Be

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Oct 31, 2025, 3:32 AM

why reading hard books is important despite how difficult it can be

In middle school and high school, your teachers probably encouraged you to seek out primary sources, which are original accounts of a topic, as opposed to secondary sources, which are retellings or summaries of... However, teachers often don’t acknowledge an important fact: Primary sources are really boring and hard to read. If they’re historical texts, they’ll have different writing conventions, which makes them much harder to parse. Or, if they’re from the present but are academic, they’ll use language that is uncommon outside of their field. Reading a modern account that summarizes the topic, such as a Wikipedia article, can help you understand a concept much more quickly than you would’ve by reading primary sources. With the advent of the internet, summaries have proliferated.

It used to be that if you wanted to learn something, and your professor’s curriculum wasn’t working for you, the best way to learn was to go to the library and find a book... But now we live in a more advanced world where challenging subjects have been summarized and popularized in YouTube videos and Wikipedia articles. Learning class material via YouTube isn’t bad by itself—I’ve certainly saved many hours by watching videos by The Efficient Engineer instead of reading my textbooks—but using YouTube as your professor won’t work forever for... First, as you continue to learn from the internet, you’re bound to notice diminishing returns. For example, there must be hundreds of thousands of videos, articles and websites out there that explain how to multiply and divide fractions or factor polynomials. Once you get higher up into mathematics and have to deal with concepts such as derivatives and Laplace transforms, though, things get trickier.

There’s still information out there, but it gets much harder to find resources that will explain it better than the textbook you paid an extortionate amount of money for. Eventually, once you reach math concepts that I’m not educated enough to know the names of, you will have to accept the sad truth that not all knowledge is free and easy to find... Some of it can only be gained from an expert in the field, which is why becoming a part of an academic community is useful. But, much more often, it’ll exist in a textbook or journal, completely unsummarized. If, up to that point, you’ve been avoiding textbooks like the plague, what happens then? Second, a person who relies on summaries can be abused by them.

The act of summarizing itself involves making value judgments about what parts of a text are important, and the person making that video may not even be aware of the judgments they made. More importantly, there’s active disinformation: Someone could simply lie about what’s in the text that they’re summarizing. How would you know that they’re wrong? This risk of misinformation isn’t just unique to us college students, though. Most people get their facts and opinions not from primary sources, but from news outlets or commentators that do the research for them. Obviously, if you relied solely on primary sources at all times, you’d spend all your time doing research and never come to any conclusion.

But being a responsible agent of knowledge means that when your brain tells you that something doesn’t seem right, you have to do the research the hard way. Still, being good at reading complex works is important in other ways. Being able to parse legal documents, tax forms or contracts can help you catch important points that you otherwise would’ve missed. 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.

In the context of classical education, where the cultivation of wisdom and virtue is paramount, reading hard books is not just beneficial — it is essential. Reading a difficult text requires patience, focus, and perseverance. When a book is challenging, the reader cannot simply coast through it in a passive way. Instead, he or she must engage actively, rereading passages, looking up words, and considering complex ideas. This process strengthens the mind much like physical exercise strengthens the body. In an age where attention spans are shrinking, the discipline developed through reading demanding works is invaluable.

A student who has struggled through The Republic by Plato, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, or The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer will develop the ability to sustain deep thought. This intellectual stamina prepares individuals for rigorous study in any discipline, whether in law, medicine, theology, or philosophy. Even more importantly, it enables them to engage with the weighty questions of life with clarity and insight. Many of the greatest works of literature, philosophy, and theology do not provide easy answers. Instead, they invite the reader into a serious intellectual and moral struggle. Consider Augustine’s Confessions, where the author wrestles with questions of sin, grace, and divine providence.

Or regard Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which raises profound questions about justice, revenge, and the meaning of existence. These works challenge us not just to understand but to engage, to debate, and to form our own reasoned conclusions. By reading hard books, we learn that truth is not always simple. Life’s most significant questions — What is justice? What is virtue? What is the good life?

— are not easily answered. Grappling with these texts prepares us for the complexity of real-world ethical and philosophical dilemmas. “Good books are over your head; they would not be good for you if they were not. And books that are over your head weary you unless you can reach up to them and pull yourself up their level.” — Mortimer Adler I’ve just finished reading The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. It took 10x longer than expected.

What slowed me down was the numerous moments I sat back in awe at what I’d just read on the page (it’s profound—you should read it). But also the fact that it’s not an easy read. It’s certainly not something you can leisurely scan through and gain an understanding of the concepts. Thanks for reading Sam Matla! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. And tt’s been a good reminder of the value of difficult books.

There’s something you get from reading hard books that you don’t get from easy books. And that something is what I want to explore in this post. Okay, so I guess we have to begin with what is a hard book? And to be honest, it likely varies from reader to reader. Now, you're probably thinking "Oh, great, she really knows where she's going with this." Fear not, I kind of do... In my Venn diagram of interests, you will likely not be surprised to hear that I watch a lot of content about books and reading.

Part of the discussion online (that the algorithm is feeding me), is that attention spans are struggling. As a Millennial -- yes. There's always the next thing, the next video when we are scrolling, the next clickbait article, the next opinion designed to enrage or annoy. And so, we are fed a steady stream of "the next thing". This is the video that first got me thinking about this topic, opens a new window. I do recommend giving it a watch.

In my opinion, the "hard books" can be books that maybe are outside preferred genres. They are the classics, they are perhaps non-fiction, maybe science fiction, maybe something else. The point of reading hard books is to keep curiosity alive. We have the wealth of all of human knowledge in our pockets, and I know at least for me, I visit the same sites, and check the same social medias every single day. The place where I still demonstrate my highest levels of curiosity is in my reading. Reading (and I mean that in a consuming books kind of way as audiobooks and ebooks ARE reading) allows us to develop empathy for people and groups we don't intimately know, allows us to...

I feel so personally connected to the act of reading. And it has meant so much to me. It has been a lifelong comfort, and I missed it when I wasn't able to read a few years ago. Do I read for pleasure? Yes, absolutely I do. All reading is valid reading, I am merely suggesting if you feel a disconnect that maybe reading that "hard" thing for you will help bring you back to the reading you've loved before.

These are my "hard" books. Books I enjoyed in spite of myself, books I wasn't sure I'd finish, books that made me think, books that changed (or validated) my opinion, and books that I felt made me a different... Words, be they written or spoken, texted or tweeted, are under intense scrutiny these days. Publicly spoken or written words are met with criticism, anger, and even a rush to censor and punish the person who said them. We bristle, we shake our heads, and perhaps we even protest such unfortunate myopia, especially when we agree with the censored speech. Why, then, in certain Catholic and Christian circles, is the propriety of reading words that come at us from the other direction, from voices that challenge us or clash outright with our sense of...

Can it be worthwhile, particularly in the case of literature, to read about a depraved character, or to consider the ideas of an author whose life was less than exemplary? Or must we, on our pilgrim journey towards holiness, simply avoid such literary topics as scandalous stumbling blocks? If our instinctive response to the “cancel culture” is disapproval, and if we think that people who steadily challenge the reigning, secular socio-cultural mentality should be allowed to write and speak, so should we... We cannot, in good conscience, enact our own version of “Christian cancel-culture” and remain consistent. Let us, then, consider the propriety and even the necessity of the thoughtful reading of literature that stretches us beyond our comfort zone. Such literature may include objectionable elements and may be written by authors whose worldview, behavior, or experiences may diverge from what is virtuous and moral.

Arguably, however, careful readers must encounter such content or risk living in prideful isolation, without the sympathetic understanding of diverse human experiences that facilitates and enables true charity. Pope St. John Paul II, in his Letter to Artists, pointed out some of the key dynamics at work in art or literature that focuses the reader on the darker side of things: Even beyond its typically religious expressions, true art has a close affinity with the world of faith, so that, even in situations where culture and the Church are far apart, art remains a kind... True art, in this estimation, can serve as a valuable, two-way bridge that enables communication between a culture and a Church that can at times seem worlds apart. But at the core of every soul are regions both resplendent and shadowed, and art has the potential to reveal these, and to draw back the veil on our oft-hidden commonalities.

Why Reading Hard Books Is Important Despite How Difficult It Can Be

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