I was having struggles reading theory. It takes me forever to get through a couple pages of State and Revolution. Back when I read it, it took me almost an hour to get through like ten pages of Lenin’s Imperialism and actually internalize what he was saying instead of zoning out midway through. I’m starting to think it may be because Lenin and Marx write like you’re intimately familiar with everything going on, but I’ve got a very big gap in my history education and I find that it makes it harder to read their works. Add to that the fact that their English is a little antiquated and I just have difficulties putting it together. I tried to read another book—Capitalizing on Crisis—that was recommended to me on an anticapitalist reading list, and I had some serious difficulty there too. Much moreso than S&R. I also had problems with Origin of the Family and it feels like just reading a preface is an automatic non-starter for reading for me. Blackshirts and Reds was an easy read though.
Randomly, I was at Barnes and Noble the other day and decided to pick Fujimoto’s Fire Punch and read it. Somehow I got through the whole thing in 12 hours, with a 3 hour break in the middle to take an exam and drive somewhere. Probably the most thematically dense manga I’ve ever read. Would love to do a literary analysis on it but that’d be hella time consuming and I wouldn’t even know where to start.
Anyways, I digress, point is I wanted to ask if anyone else here struggled with reading like this? Maybe it’s the ebooks, I know I’ve never liked ebooks, but I read half the manga online. Then again I guess a picturebook is easier lol.
My tip would be to not feel like you have to jump into a book with no context or study aids. Sometimes it’s best to read summaries, wiki articles, videos, etc on a book so you’re already familiar with topics discussed without needing to stop to look something up. I am personally doing this now with Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks
I was having trouble recently, too, after a long hiatus, but I established a goal to read 30 minutes a day 4 out of every 5 days. That seems to have helped me significantly.
I think sometimes we feel we ought to read something but we just aren’t finding it interesting enough to hold our attention. You can clearly read quickly and easily when it’s something you’re really enjoying.
I found it helpful to practice reading by reading fiction in order to build up the tolerance for non-fiction. Short Stories also help build up a tolerance for reading longer books.
Theory can be dense and the unusual language can make it more difficult to get through. What you are describing is very normal until you have gotten used to it. You can try reading something more casual like a fantasy novel to relax in between reading theory.
+1 for audiobooks and if you’re like me you’ll want a mechanical task you don’t have to pay attention to
I’d say that’s probably not uncommon. Try audiobooks that’s how I read a few that were just too dense for me. There’s also like a study guide/student version of Marx’s Capital that was really helpful. Luna Oi helped publish or write (both?) a book on dialectical materialism and those were easier to understand than some of the older theory books. There’s also nothing wrong with taking breaks. I stopped reading outright communist books for a bit to read parapolitical books and now I want to go back to theory.
I will say that Stalin’s Dialectical & Historical Materialism was the easiest of the typically recommended classical communist literature to read. It was honestly more engaging to me than Blackshirts and Reds to the point I was disappointed it was so short. The words for that one flowed straight off the page for me for whatever reason, and to this date it has probably been the most significant work in my journey to understand materialism as a philosophy. Maybe it just has to do with the presence vs lack of historical context? I don’t recall any specific historical events being mentioned in Stalin’s work—or at least none that required substantial context to make sense—whereas in S&R and other ML works, there is usually some form of historical event going on that the authors consistently reference.
Regardless, I’ll check out Luna Oi’s study guide. Thanks for the recommendation!
