The Land and Expand Strategy for Reading
This is actually a good strategy.<p>I first came across a similar technique expounded in a book by Chaim Potok, &quot;The Chosen&quot; (good book, I really enjoyed it).<p>One of the protagonists, Danny Saunders, was the son of a rabbi and <i>a genius</i> who was trying to become a psychologist, so he started reading Freud in its original form. He found the texts impenetrable even after months of trying.<p>Then he had an insight: in the study of the Torah (his forte,  being a rabbi&#x27;s son), folks typically studied with the help of commentaries by rabbis over the generations who have disputed and explained the texts in different ways. Commentaries provide context and a jumping off point into the text. So Danny Saunders took the same approach to studying Freud -- instead of reading Freud, he studied commentaries on Freud and read what has already been said about him. This helped him understand the original work better.<p>Many of us do the same instinctively: we read the Wikipedia article on a subject to get a lay of the land before jumping into a subject matter. Context is valuable in pedagogy, which is why it&#x27;s often helpful to have an instructor for reading hard books -- otherwise anyone would be able to read any book in their language and &quot;get it&quot; -- which is not true. I read English just fine, but I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m able to understand Finnegan&#x27;s Wake without any help.<p>p.s. We often hear advice that we should study texts in their original form without commentary, so that we can approach the subject with an unbiased lens and interpret it for ourselves. But my take is our lens is always biased, and worse still, in subject areas we are unfamiliar with, our biases are uninformed. I think a much more productive approach is to read with commentary but to read critically -- to question and to explore alternative interpretive options. Without this kind of approach, most important works are just too difficult and we&#x27;d probably just not try.