Difficulty comprehending books

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Do any of you people here have difficulty comprehending what you're reading in some books?

I find that some authors write in a style which renders the book as being almost unreadable to me. No matter how hard I try to properly perceive what is written, I fail.

I imagine that me having difficulty comprehending what is written in books can be because of the fact that I have an ASD.

There are some books that I totally 'get', and then there's a whole slew of others where I don't know what the hell is going on at any point in the novel.



Is anybody else here like me?

I have difficulty reading abstract material too but the good news is even regular people have that difficulty. Most books I read are concrete. In high school, we were forced to read books that were very hard to read and lot of kids didn't get what was going on in the book they were reading, so our teacher had to sit in the front of the class and explain what was going on in the story. Even my aid had to buy Sparky Notes on the book we were reading because she was having difficulty understanding what was going on in it.

I read a lot... though I started late. And I have horrible reading comprehension. I basically guess what the hell's going on and I'm often right. As a hint, I got out of science at university and switched over to English, and specialized in poetry so that I could learn to read as good as I do. Studying latin also helped me.

I understand what is important in books, but that's often now what other people think is important... what you read in school or for work is probably useless. Consider finding stuff you love to read and see if it improves. I think it is more about interest that relates to focus.

I can read the same paragraph 3 or 4 times and its meaning will be different each time It can take me an age to read a simple book. I generally read books aimed at readers a lot younger than myself like Conan the Barbarian and have been known to fight my way through a Terry Pratchet but much prefer an audio book.
There are many books I just cannot read and make sense of, I must have picked up Dune about 100 times and never got past the second page, the audio book kept me enthralled

That's funny because I tried to listen to the Motorcycle Diaries and my mind kept wandering so much that I have no idea what the story was about!! Certain styles of writing are really difficult for me to comprehend, too. In school I never knew what was going on in English class. However, we were required to read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and I totally "got it" while everyone else seemed to struggle with that one. They thought it was very dry and boring and I thought it was exciting because I could follow it!! ! I even had a teacher in the 5th grade who had noticed that I did better with non-fiction books, but she had no idea why. She used to force me to read all of this fantasy fiction stuff thinking that I would "learn to like it". WHATEVER!! To this day I prefer to read "about" something. I like to read the news for this reason.... not just any news, but science news. It is ever changing and always concrete. Same for my hobbies and such. I just don't read too many novels. I can't get into them and even if they are interesting to me I have a hard time following. I totally relate to the part about having to read something two, three or four times to get it!!

Come to think of it..... when I was a kid I could read individual words but when I would string them together to read a sentence I couldn't recall what all I had just read. The teachers always thought I was lazy or ret*d and I was always in the lowest level reading class with kids that were obviously having even more problems than me. Didn't help the ol' self esteem much.....

I'm a wee bit odd when I'm reading sometimes. It can be like I'm seeing a movie (sometimes with imagined textures/smells/tastes) when I get really into a book and I can't hear people/t.v.'s/radios at all sometimes whilst reading.

we're all different. I used to read 100 pages a day. But I cannot listen to anything. Really bad aural comprehension. I once read a novel 3 x back to back. For me, the world is text, to be read.

I have the same thing going on.

I am good at English and those kinda subjects, but I can't read books for the life of me. I can't never comprehend what's going on, ever.

[quote="Chair"]

Some authors write in a fashion which is much more conceivable to me. Others completely lose me, and I still do not know why.

It may have more to do with the author's skill as a writer(or lack thereof).

Sometimes. For example, though I enjoy the story "A Christmas Carol" and try to read it every Christmas, I cannot for the life of me get anywhere with an actual Dickens novel. I realized it was because he just wrote them so differently, his short stories being written for newspapers and a good deal lighter on the details. It had to be in bite sized pieces so as to be published as a serial. And whenever I hear an excerpt from what is considered brilliant and beautiful writing these days (as I recall from back when I used to watch Oprah Winfrey and she would read bits of her favorites aloud) I just wonder when the author is ever going to get to the point. My writing, while hardly fully matured, tends to be somewhat more personable than the endless passages of description and metaphor that she favored.

I was just like you Chair, and it took awhile for me to "learn" how to read books. I'm still learning how to read them because I read at a snail's pace compared to other readers. I also encounter words I don't understand or writing styles that confuse me. I think the key to remember is to use your imagination when you read. Form the words your reading into pictures in your mind. Visualize a paragraph in your mind as a scene in a film. There is no wrong way to have the story unfold in your mind. Just let your mind soar.

My first complete read was the novelization book of James Cameron's The Abyss (a great read by the way). You may enjoy the Harry Potter books. When you are able to do this you'll be able move to books with no visual reference, but you'll still be able to see the stories play out in your mind like a movie. Once that happens you will experience some of the best films your imagination will create!


As an exercise try and visualize this opening paragraph from "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn...