The Joy of Reading Books You Don't Understand

Kafka [1] on which types of book to read:

"I believe one should only read those books which bite and sting. If the book we are reading does not wake us up with a blow to the head, then why read the book? To make us happy, as you write? My God, we would be just as happy if we had no books, and those books that make us happy, we could write ourselves if necessary. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that hurts us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like if we were being driven into forests, away from all people, like a suicide, a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us." [2]

[1] Brief an Oskar Pollak, 27. Januar 1904. , https://homepage.univie.ac.at/werner.haas/1904/br04-003.htm

[2] Literal translation by ChatGPT. Original:

"Ich glaube, man sollte überhaupt nur solche Bücher lesen, die einen beißen und stechen. Wenn das Buch, das wir lesen, uns nicht mit einem Faustschlag auf den Schädel weckt, wozu lesen wir dann das Buch? Damit es uns glücklich macht, wie Du schreibst? Mein Gott, glücklich wären wir eben auch, wenn wir keine Bücher hätten, und solche Bücher, die uns glücklich machen, könnten wir zur Not selber schreiben. Wir brauchen aber die Bücher, die auf uns wirken wie ein Unglück, das uns sehr schmerzt, wie der Tod eines, den wir lieber hatten als uns, wie wenn wir in Wälder vorstoßen würden, von allen Menschen weg, wie ein Selbstmord, ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns."

A useful habit that I've begun to follow with more complicated books—especially when reading them out of personal interest—is to actively avoid taking notes or worrying about background material on a first read.

I've recently read and greatly enjoyed a historical fiction novel called "Augustus" written by John Edward Williams and published in 1972. On the surface level, it's about the events of the life of Augustus Caesar (better known in the book as "Octavian")—but on a deeper level, it's about the rarity of longtime friends in life, and dealing with aging and one's mortality. I put the novel off for a year because I thought I had to read a non-fiction historical account of Augustus's life first, as I thought I couldn't appreciate the novel without doing so, due to the unfamiliar character names and events. But one day, I just decided to try it out—and I found myself naturally remembering the character names and events without special care in reading the novel.

Similar experiences have been reported by people engaging with various forms of media. I've seen readers take copious notes on the novel "Infinite Jest," which has a reputation for being a difficult read, only to burn out. In contrast, readers who have finished the novel said that they didn't need to take notes, and that the story began to make sense simply by reading more.

I've also seen a similar pattern from subjects as academic mathematics, where some learners spend too much time on textbook explanations instead of working on the textbook problems, to subjects as relaxed as computer role-playing games, in which some players end up dropping these games due to a perceived need to take notes to understand the story, before they can get immersed in the game's world.

I think a lot more understanding and enjoyment of various subjects can be attained by being comfortable with confusion for a while. While note-taking has its place in understanding a subject, I've personally found that immersion is the most important factor for understanding.

I’ve recently moved to Europe and found myself surrounded by hundreds of famous galleries, which are essentially the main entertainment here.

I started visiting them and looking at classical paintings, little by little googling what it was and why. It turned out to be so exciting!

Now, a year later, I can say for sure which of the women with a severed male head in their hands in the painting is Judith and which is Salome. And I understand much better how people lived in these parts before, and why they live the way they do now.

Therefore, I completely agree with the author of the article - sometimes you need to plunge into the unknown, and this unknown will reward you.

I’m afraid to imagine how many discoveries await me in museums of contemporary art.

The article title reminded me of when I was young and used to read Byte Magazine. Byte used to cover a wide range of topics, and could get quite technical, but the big thing that is vastly different to today is that you would get a monthly digest of articles that were selected by the editors, not by yourself. And I used to read it cover to cover. There was a lot I didn't understand, but also I feel like I gained a wider knowledge than if I only read what I was interested in, and many times the ideas that I was exposed to turned out to be useful much later in life.

Some of them ended up being distractions too, like playing with hardware, or writing a compiler, but it was all very interesting.

I had a huge complex in my youth , I simply couldn’t read as fast as my peers. Now, I realize that I was going too fast, and by slowing down, taking my time and reading slowly I could absorb more, and understand, and I had this amazing ability to never forget anything I did read (at least for an extended period of maybe 2-3 years). I realized over time that going fast isn’t for me. Better to go slow absorb, digest and ultimately retain more would get me where I needed to be. Never did well in school in terms of grades but ultimately I got better and better doing a masters and actually got sponsored to do my PhD. Many years I read but could not understand, but ultimately it was the joy of reading slow that got me further than the joy of reading and not understanding.

When I was about 14 years old, my parents saw my interest in electronics and computers and went to a university professor they knew and purchased 6-7 books on various topics. (Mostly electrical engineering and some programming)

They were designed for 2nd or 3rd year university students, and they were way wayyyy beyond me, but I used to read them, over and over, and slowly parts of them were becoming clearer to me, even the bits I didn’t understand (at all) must have been going into my memory because later when the concepts started to click, then the connections were being made.

It took me years, I read the books many times over and over all through my teens. Reading books I don’t understand has become a lifelong joy for me, just yesterday I got my subscription to “Advanced Materials” and I have thousands of articles to read!

I do like some "hard" fiction like the Stephenson mentioned in TFA, as well as Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, but my mind immediately went to some of the harder technical writing I've enjoyed - The Art of Computer Programming; SICP and other Lisp texts, math books, etc.

I once spent a very pleasant short vacation on a beach on Lake Michigan reading Peter Gabriel Bergmann's "Introduction to the Theory of Relativity," finding pleasure in gradually unraveling the notation, the mathematics, and the ideas, in a quiet and beautiful setting.

It always surprises me when I meet engineers who don't enjoy reading technical books, but different strokes and all that. It takes a kind of patience and persistence to unravel a technical text, which can be its own reward if you're not trying to solve a specific technical problem at the moment.

Related to "I don't entirely understand what I just read, but I loved it" from the article - some time ago (I'd say it's been years now), there was a submission on HN (at least I believe I found it on HN, though I'm not 100% sure) about rules for critiquing art (again, I'm not 100% certain, but this is how I remember it). Unfortunately, I think I didn't finish the whole article, but at the start it said that if you want to critique art, you have to understand that:

1. There is art you love that is also actually good. 2. There is art you don't love but is actually good. 3. There is art you love that is actually bad. 4. There is art you don't love that is also actually bad.

If you know which article I'm talking about, please let me know. I've been trying to find it on and off for what seems like years now.

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

This reminds me of the recent "Neuromancer" discussion here on HN: The early cyberpunk writing style, and especially that of William Gibson, made extensive use of unexplained technical terms. The story was occasionally hard to follow. But that was part of "cyberpunk", at least initially. If you were really about to read a report from a different possible world, you also wouldn't understand everything. In reality not everything serves some central plot. There are always superfluous details, and (especially for fictional settings) things that are hard to understand for the outsider.

I remember reading, a few years ago, Amazon reviews of the 1990 William Gibson/Bruce Sterling novel "The Difference Engine". Apparently most people expected a normal novel, just with a "steampunk" setting, so naturally they were disappointed and complained about the book being confusing. That's because it's a cyberpunk novel. Which is a literary genre, not merely a setting like steampunk. (The latter term didn't even exist when the book came out.)

I remember Stanisław Lem (an SF author well-known outside the English speaking world) said approximate this about historical novels: Historical novels have the advantage of depth, they can reference a world that is much more complex than required for their plot, they can set themselves in the deep complexity of actual history -- whereas fantasy and sci-fi books must always rely on their own made-up world, which almost necessarily looks flat and shallow in comparison, even if it seems spectacular on the surface.

I really came to understand this when I read Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose". All the historical details are so intricate that they are almost impossible to match by a novelist writing about a fantasy world or the far future.

This is, perhaps, also why The Lord of the Rings is such a great fantasy story, and why most other fantasy stories fall short in comparison: Tolkien didn't just write a novel. He invented a fictional language first, then an elaborate fictional history around it, and the Lord of the Rings is really just a small part of this story near the end. When reading the book, you constantly read allusions to "historical details" about things that happened thousands of years ago in Valinor, Beleriand, Númenor, in certain ancient wars etc. These "superfluous details" are occasionally hard to understand (except if you read Tolkien's posthumous "Silmarillion", which his son compiled from fragments) but they approximate something like the depth that usually only a historical novel can achieve.

I started reading the original edition of Don Quijote in Spanish with two years of high school Spanish under my belt. Ten years later, I finally finished the first book.

I spent so much time on "Road to Reality". I was mostly confused, but then every once in a while something would click and it was mind blowing. Now I'm going back through linear algebra. I'm also looking at the hardest book I've tried "Moonshine beyond the monster" I'm trying...

Wouldn't it be better just to slow down? They're not books that can't be understood.

edit: I've spent years reading some books. Sometimes I stop and realize that the words are just washing over me; I backtrack until I'm at a place that I've understood the path I took to get there. I go forward again, maybe realize that I'm actually missing the background to go farther. If I've been fascinated up to this point, I find another book that will give me the background. I may come back to the original book a month later or ten years later. The other material may obviate the need for the original book altogether, or even give me contempt for the original book.

This seems more like somebody who doesn't speak French reading French books, and claiming that imagining the sounds that might be made from the sight of the words in the book leads them to some sort of transcendence. People write to be understood. I read to understand. I'm not just checking off things and trying to come up with a review filled with vague evocative metaphors that I can impress people with at a party. There's an obsession with appearances and presentation rather than actual engagement. Associative dream logic in the place of understanding. Why not just meditate on the cover painting and say you read it?

I’ve recently started reading The Iliad. I find it challenging because characters can be referred to by a variety of different things, even within the same paragraph or two, so it is challenging to follow the conversation or who is being discussed.

I’ve taken to asking ChatGPT to summarize chapters and key characters within the chapter after I’ve finished each chapter and it helps give me feedback as to whether what I thought happened was what indeed happened. It’s also given me little contextual tidbits that are helpful and apparently would have been known to audiences of the time but for me would have gone unappreciated.

It’s helpful, though I think I’d prefer an annotated copy over ChatGPT so I have realtime information as I read without the lag of finishing a chapter first (or added friction of stopping to search and starting again)

I'm halfway through Neal Stephenson’s "Baroque Cycle" and it's absolutely delightful but it sure requires frequent dictionary/Wikipedia consultation, at least for me.

A appropriate difficulty level is where you understand enough of the book to enjoy it, but that there are parts that are just beyond your reach so you can grow.

I think there is a limit. If it's a topic you can look things up about (Maybe something technical where you haven't read the prerequisites.). The initial example from the article is interesting, in that you can learn so much about history with the looked-up context, but you can still follow and enjoy the books without it - you will just not know which characters and events were real! I think you will probably remember the history better this way with a fun story-context than wrote memorization, which I believe is a point of the author.

Some material, I feel like I am too stupid for, or my brain is wired so differently from the author I will never make sense of it. Examples: Gravity's Rainbow, and parts 2 + 3 of The Divine Comedy. (Granted, the latter is full of parts where looking up contexts and references will help, but I am not sure what to do with the former; there are rare sections where I can gain a purchase on events transiently, but it mostly passes through without absorption for reasons I don't understand).

Some books "you don't understand" can change the reader, so the (new) reader experiences a (new) book in their next reading.

R.A. Lafferty, from “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies” (1978), an alternate history of television, https://www.wired.com/story/who-is-r-a-lafferty-best-sci-fi-...

  There seemed to be several meetings in this room superimposed on one another, and they cannot be sorted out. To sort them out would have been to destroy their effect, however, for they achieved syntheses of their several aspects and became the true meeting that never really took place but which contained all the other meetings in one theatrical unity.

> ..On first read, yes, it’s nonsense, but this is the experience of experiencing Lafferty. He doesn’t make any sense, until you decide, and you must decide, that he does. Then, suddenly, he becomes a genius. Read the paragraph again. What’s he talking about? Today, you might realize he’s predicting Zoom: a main meeting full of individual nonmeetings taking place in chats and side slacks that together constitute a constant and overarching supermeeting! Tomorrow, it’ll sound like something else entirely.

I read the Baroque Cycle almost 20 years ago and have to say I enjoyed every bit of it, the relatable characters, the circle of life and the science was amazing. I am sure there were parts that went completely over my head but it felt good to sit down open the large books and dive in. Thanks to the poster, it's about time I re-read the series.

I feel like the idea of understanding media has, for many of us, become a prison. The purest version of understanding is kind of a personal relationship to a piece of media. A relationship you form while engaging with it that enlivens your life and has the potential to broaden your horizons. But we live in a moment where it's very popular to talk about "the right understanding of media"[1] and therefor everyone begins to need to explain their relationship to every piece of media to their friends.

The bare experience of reading The Baroque Cycle completely stuffed full of historical references you don't understand is kind of its own immersive experience in a less media-rich climate. You kind of get a sense what it might be like to have no access to education and run into like, Leonardo da Vinci or whoever. But then it comes time to explain that experience to someone else and they might think you were silly for not just looking the names up.

I just think it's too bad. I once almost broke my wrist snow boarding, but my friend wanted to finish the day so I hung out in our car. The medics had given me a dose of percocet[2] for the pain and I had just started Neuromancer. Finishing that book in that hot car, slightly high, has both erased all of "what happens" from my mind and left me with this kind of indelliable feeling of what it was like to be reading the book. I didn't understand it and feel all the better for it.

[1] I think it's very easy to understand why people want to set others straight on points like this, even if I don't like the ecosystem it creates.

[2] I think it was percocet? Though it seems odd that I would be given a dose of narcotics for a bad sprain.

Three books come to my mind on this topic: 1) Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge by Niels Bohr - and to think this was a series of speeches is pretty intense… still haven’t read it through to this day after ~7 years. 2) The Master and His Emissary by Iain Mcgilchrist- I’ve been pushing on and off since late 2019 and I’m ~80% through having understood ~75% and retained ~35% of what I read. It’s been a nice experience. 3) Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace - got ~30% through and haven’t touched it in years.

Strange to me so few comments, none based on my skimming mention either, 1) reading code, 2) shakespeare.

There's levels of reading. Sometimes you skim, sometimes close read. Sometimes you read to glean something about the author, sometimes for pure enjoyment. Different codebases have to be read in different ways. Shakespeare can be appreciated without "getting it" just enjoying the meter and an occasional bit of word play. You can see cool programming tricks without grokking the entire codebase.

Read, reread, get what you want or need. Come back later on if you find there's more value. There is no right way to do it.

I know he’s well regarded on this site but I’ll espouse my own experience with Cormac McCarthy books. Blood Meridian is nearly impossible to get through without some kind of version of a “urban dictionary for the old west” at hand, but the lurid language draws you in constantly. The beauty of language, I think, lies in the absolute specificity of a word. One that could only exist at a certain point in time, and his books are filled to the brim with language like that. Is it dense? Yeah absolutely, but it makes your arm hairs tingle, some of the writing he employs.

When I was 11 I was attracted to the cover of a book that showed some boats sailing on a terraformed Mars.

Reading Blue Mars, the final book in the series, at age 11 totally blew my mind. Not only was I already scientifically inclined, so Sax's explanations of the world and descriptions of materials science really expanded my 'scope of the possible' (even if a bunch of the high tech stuff was hand wavy), this book also contained their constitutional convention which rolls on for a whole bunch of pages about the different government systems and some of the impact these power structures can have. At 11 I had no conception of what an anarchist is or socialist or communist was (The wall had fallen 7 years earlier and China was a flea bite) but it populated my 'potential space' of how all these words and concepts I barely understood were related to each other, which made it a hell of a lot easier later in life to have some grounding in which they had been discussed

I get the point. Only a few days ago I watched the restored version of "Jeanne Dielman,...", to its full length of 3 hours and 20 minutes. Nothing happens in that movie, absolutely nothing at all, except for the registration of a housewife's daily routine and a few conversations with her son. Until the last quarter of an hour. You start with boredom, wanting to stop and forget all about it. But then curiosity kicks in, and you learn to appreciate the innumerable small details.

If we read for the joy of not understanding, why don't we write books that are optimized for sounding interesting and clever but have no real meaning?

If works do not test you or bring new ideas, then what is the point of reading them in the first place?

Uncomfortable nonfiction is like eating your vegetables. There is much disquieting history and knowledge that must not be ignored.

Mainstream mass public education will not teach curiosity or imbue anyone with ambition or initiative, it is something one must cultivate on their own.

You'll get my copy of The Integral Principles of the Structural Dynamics of Flow, by L.G. Claret, when you pry it out of my cold dead hands. I may never ram-chaw a partial chim set, but damned if I'm going to fear bolts, quams, squalcrats, or (especially) barms.

When I saw the article I thought of The Baroque Cycle which I finished a year or two ago and am currently working up the courage to tackle it again. Pleasantly surprised that it was the first series mentioned. I'm thinking of trying it this time on Kindle so I can look some things up without leaving the book.

This is how I feel about most HN posts.

This is how I felt listening to the audiobook of Infinite Jest over the course of many months. Who was that person again? What's going on? Doesn't matter, it's something to listen to.

There's a fine line between "I don't need to understand" and "I have no idea what's going on". At some point it becomes unworkable and you have to give up.

Those that read 'The Book of the New Sun' will know the feeling

Started reading a book by Irish humorist Ross O’Carroll-Kelley.

It’s full of Dublin slang specific to the 90’s I think. I don’t understand a lot of it but it’s fascinating to sort of listen in on the patois.

This reminds me of a (half-remembered) quote from Joe Strummer about reggae songs - the words are so hard to understand that every time you listen to them you understand a little more.

Alan watts once gave a book of Zen koans to a friend in hospital. Friend read it and said "I didnt understand a word of it but it was very enjoyable".

That is one way of doing it.

It's like watching 3Blue1Brown. A look into the soul of the universe causing a sense of awe and wonder, but little understanding.

Looking up history for context while reading The Baroque Cycle? That's like looking up spoilers!

"Books are a uniquely portable magic." — Stephen King

The title of this post does not correctly reflect the title of the article.

I read Hacker News without understanding 90% of it for years.

For books that you don’t understand much about and can get daunting/painful reading it, you should use the table of contents and read the most interesting one first, then the next..

This reminds me of something that I heard once from a Chinese teacher. I can't vouch for the accuracy of it, but he was definitely on to something: In the West, it is assumed that it is the speaker's job to make himself understood to his listeners. In the East, it is the other way around.

In recent times, it seems like we've gotten even more extreme. The speaker or writer must not only spoon-feed the understanding, they also have to provide the motivation and the entertainment. Which I find sad, because some things you can't get unless you go to the effort of extracting them yourself. (See many reproducible psychology findings about retention being highly correlated with depth of processing, for example.) It's like the information equivalent of highly processed food.

I find myself falling into this trap on sites like this. An interesting but difficult article will be posted, I won't immediately know what to think or where I stand on the topic, and I'll flip to the comments so that I can get some part of the collective to tell me what to think and how to feel about it. Which is also sad.

In paintings, it is known that the viewer can get out more than the painter put in. It used to be the same with writing, but it feels like that is becoming more rare and less acceptable. If a reader can't follow the argument, it's automatically the author's fault and a waste of the reader's time. Heaven forbid the reader might need to exert some effort and grow in the gleaning.

Can someone tell me why this website asks if you are between 13 and 15 years old?

I recently read 100 Polish books in 100 consecutive days to see how much of the language I'd learn (I also listened to the matching audiobook of each book). To make meaning of the text, I relied on quick look-ups, context clues, and the audiobook's narration (inflection, pacing, etc.). At first, I hardly understood anything and didn't know any Polish vocabulary, but somewhere around book #50, I started recognizing words and phrases and even experienced language automaticity.

Many language experts say you should be able to comprehend about 90%+ of the vocabulary in your target language when you read, but I think that's completely unrealistic. Read as if you're fluent now, even if you don't understand a word of it. You will eventually learn!

For those interested in my experiment, I wrote a book about it called "BLITZED: What I Learned Reading 100 Books in 100 Days in My Target Language": https://a.co/d/0bKrjq44

Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit, Marx's Capital, Foucault's work, von Neumann and Morgenstern' Game Theory, and the Perl 6 Apocalypses and Exegeses from the early 2000's.

I'm dismayed that no one so far has brought up a point that's begging to be made in these sorts of things.

While the point of the article has _some_ merit, there's also another equally valid contrary argument to be made.

Just because a book - however storied & fabled - exists out there, does not mean that you should strive to find some meaning, import or significant cogitable thought when one is not clearly and immediately present.

There's a whole industry of writers that exist to exclusively furnish meaning to the lofty thoughts of some distinguished authors, that that was simply never meant or not present in the authors own words. Sometimes the authors themselves invite and regale in this kind of festive chicanery. Sometimes not. But this sort of thing - far more than useful or warranted - does exist.

In other words some works of writing often fiction but not necessarily are just elaborate exercises in getting away with balderdash.

It pays to remember the enterprise of getting published in the past has not always been equitable as is the case today.

A virtual nobody off the street couldn't expect to even get his manuscript read by a publishing house, much less get published even for a limited run. So if you were already reputed or privileged or had the blessings of a wealthy house of patrons who bankrolled your previous works, you were more widely published and translated.

In other words far too many mediocre works of the past still get top billing, than they rightly deserve largely because no one called out their bullshit.

Yes, sometimes if you don't understand the author that is because the author never had the intentions of being understood in the first place or did not have much to say of value or import, however fleeting or ethereal or unyielding to lucid language, the authors thoughts were.

HN should buck this trend and not join in adulation.