Does anyone else struggle to read textbooks?

Post Reply New Topic

I can't get through my textbooks. It's not because I struggle with reading. I read tonnes of fiction. I'm not stupid, it's not that I don't understand the stuff that's written in there. I just find it so boring and dull, that I can't read a single sentence. My brain switches off instantly. I try over and over but I just don't take in a single word of it. I often just fall asleep. I'm wasting my time and am starting to feel like giving up with University. I was wondering if anyone has any similar issues and what they do to overcome them? (As a side note, I am hoping to swap courses. But I still need to get through this module that I'm on until July. There's also the chance that I won't get onto the course I want to swap to, so may have to carry on with this course anyway.) Any advice appreciated.

I have developed personal obsessions with subjects that required serious study to learn about, and often found instances in which the material was soOoOOoo dry, tedious and dull that I could barely stay awake through a single paragraph and had to reread the same paragraph over and over sometimes, before I could grasp what the hell the author was saying. And I knew I wasn't stupid.

All I can tell you is that having encountered almost identical resistance when I first started seriously working out physically, the brain reacts very much like a muscle. When you begin to tax it's limitations, it's very hard to get anywhere. The only solution is to keep working it. The more you force yourself to ingest raw information without the sugar coating of fictional adjectives, the better your brain will get at digesting that kind of material, and eventually, it not only won't seem so excruciatingly, agonizingly boring, it will start to become easy and interesting because the new data is entering the brain smoothly and being interpreted and understood, rather than choked down and filed away, like an unappetizing, but "good for you" food.

It might help to use dry scholarly works on a subject you're actually interested in to practice on. It took me nearly four months to plow my way through the first volume of Joseph Campell's 'The Masks of God.' It took four weeks to finish volume four. Now it's as easy to read as a Stephen King novel.

couldn't read textbooks. was too slow a reader. took good notes in class and studied them the night before the test. graduated magna cum laude. science major. may be different in poli sci.

If a book, any book, doesn't hold my attention in the first chapter or two, it becomes a chore to read anything further.

Textbooks are ten times as bad as they generally are not written to entertain and hold the reader's interest.

Just as a lecture you're forced to attend will be painful to sit through if the speaker doesn't bother making the affair engaging.

One thing is to embrace the skimming and half-assed approach. I mean, a physician who is very good will skim most articles in a medical publication and read only a limited number. So, it's good having skills of both diving deep and skimming.

And, pay attention to when are your high energy periods of the day. For rxample, I tend to wake up 8:30, 9:00 and I have most energy the first hour after I wake up.

Pick up some slighty out-of-date textbooks at Half-Price Books or check them out from the library.

And pre-studying is a powerful tool. Experiment with skimming before a lecture.

1980s memory of bad advanced maths textbooks, that don't explain many of the assumptions they use in their worked examples, but assume you already know how to work things out.
Either crazy or designed to only allow minds with a certain set of instincts to cope with the course.

Maybe try different authors/writing styles of textbooks. I've found that I prefer textbooks that were written mid-twentieth century. Of course, depending on what you are studying, some textbooks may be out of date.

I sometimes have problems with textbooks written to APA standards because of style. People who write about psychology and sociology are too goddamn obsessed with being credited in text. There are so many citations that it destroys the language flow.

No... I struggle to read things that are poorly written. Good writing is concise and flows well.