What to Do When a Text Is Too Hard

The advice to read things at your level is sound, and it is no use at all on a Tuesday evening when you are on page eleven of a book you already own, wanted to read, and cannot read. The general answer — choose better next time — is a plan for the next book. This is about the one in your hands.

There is more to do about it than most readers try. The remedies below are ordered by what they cost you, cheapest first, and the order is the method: work down the list, stop as soon as the book becomes readable, and only consider the expensive ones if the cheap ones have failed. At the end there is the other decision, which is when to stop.

First, work out which kind of hard

“Too difficult” covers three unrelated problems, and a remedy aimed at the wrong one does nothing. Read a page and notice what is actually stopping you.

• Lexical. You cannot follow because there are too many words you do not know. The sentences are ordinary; the vocabulary is not. This is the usual case and the one most of the list addresses.
• Syntactic. You know every word in the sentence and still cannot say what it means. Long periods, subordination three deep, a participial clause that swallows half a paragraph, an inverted order you did not expect. Common in nineteenth-century prose, and a completely different problem from the first.
• Referential. You understand the language and not the world. Names you cannot tell apart, ranks, currencies, saints’ days, an allusion the original reader caught immediately. This one is invisible from inside — it feels like a language problem and is not.

A quick discriminator: take a hard sentence and translate it slowly, with a dictionary and as much time as you want. If you now understand it, the problem was lexical or syntactic. If you understand every word and still do not know why the sentence matters, it is referential, and no amount of vocabulary work will touch it.

The seven remedies, cheapest first

1. Move to a different part of the book

Free, and the most underused. Openings are the hardest pages of almost any book: they carry the setting, the names, the period detail, and they were written with more care than anything that follows. Skip to chapter three. If the book becomes readable, it was never too hard — you were reading the worst twenty pages of it and drawing conclusions.

The same applies inside a collection: stories are not uniformly difficult, and the one at the front is not necessarily the gentlest.

2. Read faster, not slower

Counter-intuitive and often decisive. The natural response to difficulty is to slow down, and beyond a certain point slowing down makes comprehension worse rather than better, because a sentence held in pieces for thirty seconds falls apart before it is assembled. Try a page at deliberately brisk speed, skipping everything you do not know without a pause. Some texts that are impossible at a crawl are merely hard at pace.

This is the general reading behaviour rather than a special measure — the rule about finishing the sentence before deciding anything — but it is worth applying deliberately to a book that has started to feel like work.

3. Get the plot from outside the book

Five minutes, and it raises effective comprehension more than any other single action. Read a summary of the story in your own language: an encyclopedia entry, a publisher’s description, the introduction you skipped, the afterword. Knowing what happens supplies in advance the context the text would otherwise have to supply, and every unknown word becomes easier to place.

The objection is spoilers. Weigh it honestly: a spoiled ending costs you a small pleasure once, and an abandoned book costs you the whole story plus the reading time you would have got from it. For a text that is fighting you, take the summary.

4. Add the audio

Cheap where a recording exists. Listening while you follow the page imposes a pace, which cures hesitation; supplies the phrase boundaries, which is a direct remedy for the syntactic kind of difficulty; and attaches sound to words you have only ever seen. Follow along without stopping the recording, and accept that you will lose the thread occasionally.

For a text that is hard to parse rather than hard to decode, this is often the whole cure.

5. Preload the book’s own vocabulary

Thirty to sixty minutes, once, and by some distance the best return of anything on this list that costs real time. Every book has a private vocabulary it uses constantly: a sea story runs on twenty nautical words, a courtroom drama on fifteen legal ones, a village tale on the furniture of a village. These words are rare in the language and frequent in this text, which is exactly the distribution that rewards deliberate learning.

Skim the first ten or fifteen pages without reading properly. Write down every unfamiliar word that appears more than once. You will get somewhere between fifteen and forty. Learn those, and only those, before starting again. The gain is not proportional to the number — knocking out thirty words that occur on every page can move a text several points of coverage where it counts.

This is the one place where a word list is unarguably the right tool, precisely because it is local to a text you are about to read rather than a general list of the commonest words in the language.

6. Get a version with support, or a different version

Costs money, sometimes nothing. An annotated edition of the same work, an edition with glosses at the foot of the page, or a digital copy in a reader that defines a word when you touch it will all move the effective difficulty by several points, because a two-second gloss does not empty the sentence out of your head the way a thirty-second dictionary lookup does.

A simplified or rewritten edition of the same story is the stronger version of this and carries no shame whatever. Reading a graded version now and the original in two years is a strictly better plan than reading forty pages of the original now and neither of them ever.

7. Treat a bounded piece of it intensively

The most expensive remedy and the last one to reach for. Take one page — not a chapter — and work through it properly: dictionary, grammar, notes, as long as it takes. Then close the notes and read the next twenty pages at speed.

The value is that a hard book is usually hard in a small number of recurring ways, and one page dismantled properly often exposes all of them. The danger is obvious and worth stating: this is a technique to apply to a page, and applying it to a book is how people spend four months on a novel and finish neither it nor anything else. Close reading has a ratio, and a text in triage does not suspend it.

What not to do

• Look up everything. At this density it is not reading with assistance, it is translation without the training.
• Read it out of discipline. Finishing a book you are not following teaches nothing and costs the weeks in which you would have read three others.
• Reread it immediately, hoping. Rereading is a genuine technique and it consolidates what you understood. It does not repair what you never understood, and a second pass over an incomprehensible text is a second incomprehensible text.
• Blame your tolerance for ambiguity. Below the level where guessing works, guessing does not work. That is arithmetic, not temperament.

When to stop

The remedies do not always work, and the decision to put a book down is a normal part of the method rather than a failure of it. Four signals, any one of which is enough.

1. You have tried the first three and nothing changed. Skipping ahead, reading faster and knowing the plot cost you ten minutes between them. If the page is still opaque, the gap is not a matter of technique.
2. You cannot say what happened. Close the book at the end of a page and give an account of it: who did what. A theme is not an account. If you cannot manage it twice in a row, you are not reading the book.
3. You are reading less than you were. The clearest signal and the one people ignore longest. If the sessions are getting shorter and the evenings you skip are getting more frequent, the book is no longer costing you difficulty, it is costing you the habit — and the habit is the asset.
4. It is not getting easier. A new level always feels bad for the first thirty or forty pages and then improves as the author’s vocabulary starts repeating. That improvement is the test. If page seventy is exactly as hard as page twenty, the book is not at the top of your range, it is outside it.

Distinguish stopping from abandoning. A book you cannot read this year is a book you will read easily in eighteen months, and the sensible thing is to shelve it with the date written inside the cover. Coming back to it later is one of the few genuinely satisfying ways to measure progress.

If you want to know how far outside your range the book actually is, the measurement takes ninety seconds and the numbers mean something specific: how much you need to understand. Doing the same measurement before buying is the whole of choosing a text.