What am I talking about?

Specifically speaking, I am having some fairly sophisticated books in my reading list, most of which are written in English. Some of them are about psychology, others, economy, math, game design, one for coding.?

I feel hindered, trapped in the mud of words and meanings, and also pushed very hard by myself.?Every step forward,?every chapter, every page, every line, I moved by inches. And I was counting.

Language

Language is the first threshold and a regularly botheration. I know plenty words. I have a relatively larger vocabulary, comparing to my peers. Still, I need to, from time to time, pause to look up one key word which jam my comprehension. It’s also partly because of the content itself is complicated, delicate, and sophisticated. Those books are indeed difficult to understand.

Goal setting

But I suspect language is not the major problem, and will not be one in the near future. My vocabulary is growing. Besides those hardness ahead, I have a chaser behind. That chaser is myself. I always made plans with a fixed daily amount of reading, hoping to progress constantly in a certain, let’s say, “speed”. Finally, I realized that hope was not only impossible and but also outrageously ridiculous. You cannot just assume every page in one book, especially a sophisticated one, has equal amount of content FOR YOU?to comprehend and are equally difficult to get through. Let’s make an analogy. Nowadays if you want to go somewhere, you open your navigator on your phone. Usually, after you type in your destination, it will offer you the straight-line distance. You can only use that distance as a roughly estimation for how much time it may take to get there. When I planed my reading, I used word count or number of pages to make my schedule, in detail, which I still think is good. It would?do no harm to roughly estimate a little bit before you start, only if you know that is just a probable estimation!?

Like having a conversation.

Some people say that reading a good book is like having a conversation with a wise man. True, partly. More precisely, it is like listening to a wise man.What I did was that I didn’t care what this wise man was talking about, I only wanted to beat the dead line. I was not listening! Even if I did finish my goal I set before, what is good for me to have a conversation in which I’m not listening, with all this time and energy as price??

What shall I do to change this? First, I’m not sticking to the plan. I would not feel stressful when I failed it. I learn to be tolerant of being slow, very slow. Second, I would have a glance at the titles and headings before, trying to wonder what the author want to say by them. I prepare?myself for listening.?