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Anyone else have difficulty reading traditional books? (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 22 hours ago by to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml
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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.

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[–] 2 points 5 hours ago

One of the reasons you might have problem with Lenin and marx's writings could be because of which version you read. I myself didn't have that much trouble because i read the ones hosted on prolewiki (currently down unfortunatly, I have some works downloaded if you want) which have additional notes on people and events the books themselves don't go into. I'm not sure if English is your first language but if it isn't, to my experience, translated versions also do a good job of giving additional information about those. So you could also try those instead.

But yeah, origin of the family is just a weird read. I didn't have any problem while reading Marx and Lenin but origin of the family was just annoying and somewhat boring to read.

And as other comrades have said you kind of need to get used to it. These authors lived a hundred years (and more) before us and language changes a lot within that time. It's only natural to not feel instantly connected to their way of writing. As you read more it will become normal to you.

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