Reading Very Difficult Books
The question of reading difficult books has come up tangentially a few times in the past here (for instance, on the discussion of the three-layer structure of evidence), but I wanted to make a thread to consolidate discussion on some of the typical problems we run into when reading very difficult books and how we might go about reading them in a Zettelkasten-compatible way. Perhaps there can be no general method, but we might get some value from discussing the typical problems.
First I should clarify what sorts of books I have in mind. In terms of @sfast's Barbell Method matrix, these are books where the vast majority of their contents fall into the “Difficult to understand” column, and, for most of those difficult to understand parts, it’s not immediately clear whether they are “useful” or not (i.e. it’s not immediately clear what their significance is either for you or the larger argument of the book). In the worst-case scenario, the “part” may be so obscure you do not immediately recognize it as a “part” separate from another “part.” (For instance, a typical move of 20th century French philosophy is to explicitly argue for X while implicitly critiquing Y. If you aren’t aware of Y, you’ll miss the implicit point). Obviously certain ambitious works of philosophy would fall into this category: Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Heidegger’s Being and Time, etc. But it also might include historical documents that are hard to read because they were written in a vastly different historical period than our own, sacred texts, or academic works in a field you're not familiar with.
I have a decent amount of experience reading difficult works of philosophy, so I’m going to bring up problems I typically encounter while reading them, however I’m interested in how you approach any difficult text. In terms of philosophy, the ideal situation to read these difficult books is in the context of a seminar. But we don’t always have the luxury of reading a difficult book with others. So, I want to focus on how to read a difficult book on your own. Here are some general questions that come up for me repeatedly when reading on my own, and that I haven’t totally decided on.
Read and process chapter by chapter, or read then entire book and then process the entire book?
@sfast's two step advice is (1) read the book swiftly then (2) read the book a second time to process marked passages. There are pros and cons to this in the case of difficult books. The pro of reading the entire book gives you a rough idea of the whole, so that when you go to process you have a better idea of the context of each part within the larger argument of the work. However, these books often can’t be read very swiftly (my average for difficult works of philosophy is about 5 pages every half hour, while making minimal marginalia, whereas for popular or easier non-fiction I can get up to 15 or even 20 pages per half-hour). This leads to reading the book “swiftly” often taking weeks or even months, which can lead to a lack of momentum, and forgetting of earlier parts.
On the other hand, we could proceed by reading one chapter, then processing it, then reading the next chapter, then processing it, etc. This has the advantage of producing writing earlier. Also, thinking more deeply about earlier chapters in the book will likely help you better understand later chapters. The danger is that processing too early can lead to misreadings of earlier parts of the book. For instance, a lot of philosophy in the “Continental” tradition that I’m most familiar with is written in a way that Gary Gutting calls “persuasive elaboration.” In earlier chapters, a philosopher may make provocative and controversial claims and, instead of immediately arguing for it or explaining it, will spend the rest of the book “developing, refining, extending, [and] defending the new claims in ways that will exhibit their ability to illuminate question that are of interest to philosophers,” (pp. 200-01). A result of this is that you might be liable to misunderstand the claim or the concept until you’ve read the rest of the book. This is perhaps not an issue since we can always (and indeed should) revise our notes when we realize they were a misinterpretation. However, the method of chapter by chapter processing could potentially lead to daunting tasks of revision later on: say I have 50 notes on the first few chapters of a book advancing an interpretation that I later realize is completely misguided. It might be easier to just scrap those 50 notes and start over than to go through each of them and revise or explain what’s wrong with them.
Should we include question or problem notes, notes on why we don’t understand something?
Often when I’m reading a difficult book, and I realize I’m not going to be able to figure out what a passage means by close reading that passage alone, I’ll try to write out exactly what it is I don’t understand about the passage: an ambiguous phrase, a word I don’t understand, my unclarity about the significance of a passage, etc. In this case, I don’t end up with a note describing an argument or a concept or a position, but instead an interpretive question that might end up guiding my later reading. I haven’t decided on whether I think it’s appropriate to include these sorts of question notes in my ZK. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. For instance, here’s a question note I have on Saussure’s concept of la langue:
I haven’t answered this question yet. But when I do, I would link the question note to the answer, or to a note explaining why the question is ill formed. Sometimes I find these sorts of questions useful to keep on hand, since they are usually questions a typical reader might have and could end up as good jumping off points for essays. However, a potential con could be relying on question notes as a crutch: rather than doing to the work to actually understand something, just adding a bunch of question notes to your ZK. Despite that, I tend to think question notes are more useful than not (at least, to me). But I’d be interested in what others think about this practice.
When and how to read secondary sources?
A seminar is helpful when reading a difficult book because there are others struggling alongside you and discussing the book with them can help you clarify your own thinking. We might think reading secondary sources or commentaries could be a substitute for this benefit of seminars. However, I’m not always sure. Let’s posit this as an either/or choice, like the other questions I raised. We generally have three options: (1) First process the difficult book in its entirety, then turn to secondary sources for help on particular questions you still have after completing the book. (2) Read and process secondary sources at the same time as reading and processing the difficult book. (3) Read and process secondary sources before reading the difficult book, to quickly give oneself an orientation. I’ve always been warry of (3) since I’m concerned that my own interpretation will get shaped by another author's and will cause me to overlook things that otherwise would have stood out to me. (1) appeals to me the most, but there you have the same danger of processing chapter-by-chapter that I raised: it could be you finish processing the difficult book, amass hundreds of zettels, and then find out that the secondary literature on the book all agree that your interpretation is, in fact, a common misinterpretation. Maybe you read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as an account of the actual historical development of human consciousness. Then what do you do? It seems tempting, again, to scrap your zettels rather than reframe them as a very good example of the wrong way to read Hegel.
So (2) seems like the best option. Though it can raise its own challenges. You’ll be processing multiple related books at once. This could drag out your reading even farther: say you read a chapter of the difficult book, process it, then read a commentary on that chapter in a secondary source, process it and update your notes. Typically, you’ll then have to go back to the difficult book to reread sections of the chapter to clarify your notes further. This is time consuming, but perhaps it’s the way it has to be to avoid both being too influenced by secondary sources and falling into the trap of investing too much energy in a tempting misinterpretation. I have fewer thoughts on this since, in the seminar context, I’ve found I didn’t really have to rely on secondary sources that much. On my own, however, I’m feeling a greater need for them. So I’d be grateful if anyone could share advice on how they handle processing a secondary source or commentary alongside a primary source.
Those are the thoughts I’ve had so far on reading difficult books. Some of the cons I mention might just be inevitabilities of reading very difficult books. One of the things I find valuable about these sorts of books is their ability to not merely convey information but to provoke multiple new thoughts and new interpretations that go beyond what is said in the text. This often means that processing them once is not enough. Maybe some of the problems I identity come from attempting to exhaust these books while only having to process them once… If anyone else has encountered other problems, or has any advice on processing very difficult books, I’d like to hear them.
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Comments
The Barbell Method goes out the window if you really have to wrestle with the text. That is for sure.
With difficult text, I do a lot of preprocessing on paper and longhand. The chance of me drawing is way higher because it helps to see the whole. When I have worked out a major milestone I'll process it for the final step.
I am a Zettler
These are very interesting questions you open up @Taylor ! I have also been studying philosophy in an academic context for quite some time and have struggled with taking notes on what I read.
I myself have given up taking notes on what I read in any detail. For one thing, it would take an insane amount of time to compile notes through which one could understand works such as Phenomenology of Spirit or Being and Time. As you know, many academics have made whole careers of reading a very small number of books very carefully...
Apart from the time aspect, taking notes on (very) difficult books sometimes feels futile as one’s understanding of a chapter or passage changes dramatically during the process of reading and rereading. Previous notes can appear non-sensical, after one finally ‘gets’ a certain aspect of philosophical work, calling into question all the previous effort of elaborating on a misunderstanding. Inevitably, my understanding of a text is not corrected through note-taking, but through reading.
I have come to restrict myself to margin notes and underlining of key terminology in a text, so that it is easier to find the relevant passages when I inevitably return to them. If I take notes on such texts, it is almost always in light of a certain question or theme I am exploring. I find reconstructing philosophical texts in a linear fashion very confusing, as it misrepresents the hermeneutical aspect of understanding. I have also found it helpful to create glossaries of certain terms that help me track how my own understanding of certain concepts develops; such as what Dasein means.
Being guided by themes or concepts means that I am happy to consult secondary literature without worrying too much if it may contaminate my reading of the original. I generally compare different readings of key passages from secondary texts, and that usually helps me understand what the difficulty of a passage is more clearly.
I think you are right that the problems one is faced with when taking notes on continental philosophy are unique. You may have already heard of the program Hypernomicon, which is advertised as a personal philosophy database. It struck me that it is likely very useful for tracing debates in analytical philosophy, but I would not know how to enter a text such as Phenomenology of Spirit.
Something I only found out very recently that struck me is that Luhmann did not annotate the texts he read: no underlining or writing in the margins. I have been trying to imagine what such a practice would mean for my writing and research. I would feel very lost!
This is extremely useful since it aligns with my recent realisation that my frustrations / challenges with the ZK method are as much, if not more, arising from the specific reading / note taking required for my course than the general method.
My own situation is this: I'm doing a completely untaught, home-based philosophy degree, with no previous experience / knowledge / learning in the subject at all. I get a module overview booklet to outline the key topics, a reading list and access to past papers, and I'm assessed only by a single exam per module at the end of the year. There's really no other interaction / teaching. And usually I'm doing this around a full time job with a long drive.
The reading list tends towards papers representing the main different interpretations / positions rather than recommended 'beginners guides', and is presented alphabetically, so I usually don't know if there's a sensible order to read them. So I often find myself reading something that is difficult in itself but for which I also don't have the required background knowledge to actually understand what I'm reading. As a result, if I'm finding something hard to understand, I don't know whether that's because it is hard to understand, or whether it's because I need more background knowledge than I have at the time of reading.
I am often much slower than even your 5 pages per half hour, so it can take me days to get through a single paper.
So, I recognise the difficulties you are relating, though for me they also apply to academic paper length reading (25-30 pages), and where you're taking about processing parts / chapters, I'm often finding difficulties at the paragraph level.
I too have tried both ways of reading. My natural instinct is to gain a basic understanding of each point before I move on. At the paper (rather than book) level, this often requires an understanding of each paragraph, but this is sloooooow, and as you rightly say, later points often clarify earlier ones or make it clear that earlier points were not terribly relevant.
I've tried doing a swift first reading, but I usually find I lose track of the points, with the result that towards the end I'm just looking at words.
The typical philosophy reading advice is to identify the thesis , argument and conclusion of each paper - but again this requires a good understanding first and I trip up on this, too.
I've not solved this challenge as yet. Although I seem to engage and take more in when reading proper paper based material, I do a lot of reading on the iPad and have started to lean more heavily on an app called LiquidText that allows you to drag out sections to a workspace. I've had some success with this - but there's always a temptation to start reconstructing the whole paper rather than with the essential argument.
It also doesn't get round the challenge of taking notes to understand vs taking notes of the core takeaway points. I think I'm still very much developing my skill in the first, and that's what is tripping me up when it comes to the ZK technique which seems more effective when based on the second.
@GBC I remember that it took me a semester to get used to reading, then another one to get faster. Looking back, I wonder how I could've ever read so slowly and with such a bad retention. I guess I had to unlearn my fidgety PC habits in front of a book and learn to focus and keep the context in my head. (That was all before the ZK method.)
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
@ctietze What type of books are you referring to there - the kinds of philosophical texts that we are talking about in this thread that are incredibly difficult to understand at the paragraph level (or chapter level in the case of the OP)? I'm actually pretty quick at reading ordinary books (lazy about processing them, and unskilled at identifying what to process from them, but that's another story) but for me this thread is specifically about those that really are so difficult that the Barbell method does not seem as good a fit as it does for 'ordinary' difficult books. When you read a book / paper that requires a lot of thought to understand each paragraph, doing a swift reading quickly becomes a very different exercise to swift reading something that's difficult overall but understandable at the paragraph level.
I was about to type 'because they quite often seem like a different language', and so that makes me wonder whether you had more practice at reading books that were difficult to understand when you were younger when you first started reading books in a non native language. Did you develop any techniques that would be useful?
I've added "question"-notes to my collection and I think it is somewhat useful. The reason why I think it "deserves" to be a full-blown note is that a question usually requires an answer which links together several ideas. In some sense, the question is very much like an idea or concept, it just doesn't have a form of its own yet. In this way, I've been able to build relationships up around questions and find a way to approach them. It is a little bit like how conjectures are useful, despite not being theorems.
Interesting discussion! I believe that philosophy literature rarely does bow to any method, but I found that three general approaches work for me. But let me stress that texts like this are never going to be easy to understand because they challenge (an/or establish) the very foundations of methods in many cases.
In general writing and or discussing a text can be a way to shorten the feedback loop. Try to find other ways to shorten that loop (Try to be wrong. Over and over and over again. The quicker you can be wrong the better.). Do not worry too much about longevity of the by-products of your learning journey, I'd say.
I also have this quote from the memoir of a mathematician on the subject, which I find applies somewhat to difficult philosophical texts, too:
Paul R. Halmos: I want to be a mathematician: an automathography, New York 1985, p. 69-70
@GBC
There should be some distinct factors involved:
In my experience, reading is not a single skill but a collection of skills that are "reading of specific text classes". The transfer of skill from one text class to another is suprisingly low.
From reading how you have difficulties, I'd do the following:
Basically, an outside-in approach.
And: Many academic texts are very badly written. It is not that they are difficult but they seem to purposfully obstruct their main message.
I am a Zettler
I agree with the first sentence, but why should one purposefully obstruct ones main message? I think its rather (1) the author wrestling with the writing process and just getting to the point where it is finally written up so that the obstruction results from a lack of abilities or time, or from inexperience; or (2) there is no real main message but a text needed to be written anyway (publish or perish).
Thank you.
This might be implicit in your first point, but there's an important layer after 'grouping letters to words' and that's 'grouping words to meaningful sentences' and 'grouping sentences / paragraphs to recognise the point of what's being said' - that's when reading becomes a way of understanding rather than recognising words.
And that's the very well known challenge with philosophy, isn't it - it's obviously easy to read words, but to actually understand what's being said takes a lot more time and thought than most other subjects, and often at a much more granular level. I understand every word that is presented to me in a translation of Kant but to actually understand even at a high level what's being said takes a lot more time / effort / note jotting (as just one example).
My own reading ability (point 1) is way above average (if I may say so) with normal (and even reasonably tricky academic) texts but this does not translate to skill in philosophical reading. And the point of this thread, to my understanding, is that the Barbell method isn't an immediately good fit to philosophical reading either: hence the conversation about good ways to approach it.
Anyway, I don't want to bang on about the difficulties of philosophy, it's well known to be the case and I dare say that's why many of us have chosen to do it.
Your further two points about knowledge align exactly with what I've previously mentioned, here and on other threads, as the challenges that I've been finding in using a ZK when you don't have domain or background knowledge. Personally, I now think it's possible to use ZK, but most of the conversations here assume that background knowledge is present so there's been a process of thinking and adaptation of the points and approaches discussed here.
I agree - some are very much more easily read than others. My heart leaps for joy when I open a paper that's on my essential reading list and it is well written, with clear signposting and good pacing and structure. Nonetheless, many of the papers on the essential reading list are very definitely not of this nature, but necessary to process all the same...
Oh, in German we have two seperate words for "to seem". One means it seems and its likely and the other means it seems and is rathe unlikely.
I mean: Academic texts are very often not optimised for transferring the message but rather to impress, obscure the lack of message (see your second point), etc. Many academics are not in the business of truth seeking and research but in the business of self-promoting.
I am a Zettler
Thank you everyone for your responses!
This is reassuring, and I think the truth is just that difficulty philosophy texts will require a preprocessing step between reading and zetteling. I actually was doing something like this during my MA. A professor of mine recommended Peter Elbow's book Writing Without Teachers. It was pretty much "writing is thinking" the book. He advocates a model of non-fiction writing where you cycle between freewriting sessions (writing for 10, 20, or even 45 minutes about your topic without stopping or caring about grammar, spelling, or digressions) and pulling out theses and main points from those freewriting sessions to structure into an outline, then using that outline or a point from the outline as a starting point for a new freewriting session, etc. I found that process effective, and wanted to integrate it into my ZK workflow. I was reading Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception at the time and my process was:
This was very effective for understanding, but I abandoned it because of how long it took. If I was lucky I could get steps 1 and 2 done in a single day. Step 3 would typically take 2 or 3 days, and step 4 would be 1 or 2 days. And this was just for one week's reading from one of the three seminars I was taking. So it was unsustainable. I've been since looking for a more workable "preprocessing" step, and I haven't yet found one. Maybe the solution is I have to be more discriminating in step 3, more selective with what I close read.
I think the lack of background knowledge is something I struggle with as well, though I find I it's worse when I'm reading introductory secondary source books. When I was reading Hegel and Levinas I occasionally consulted introductory texts, but I found that their explanations of Hegel's and Levinas's points were so general and simplified that there wasn't anything precise enough to grasp on to. So I just went back to reading Hegel and Levinas themselves. I'm currently doing a project on Deleuze right now and the situation is even worse. There are many terrible secondary sources on Deleuze that just repeat his own vocabulary without explaining the terms very well (ironically, this is a practice Deleuze would have despised). But, though I have a good background in French and German phenomenology, Deleuze is outside of that tradition in a way that I'm still struggling to read him directly. What I'm doing at the moment is reading some secondary sources (Todd May, Daniel Smith, and Henry Somers-Hall are some of the very few good Deleuze commentators) but I'm not bothering to process them like I would a regular philosophical text. I'm just using them to get a general orientation, and perhaps taking a few rough notes about general themes, but I'm not putting them in my ZK. That seems like a better use of my time right now.
I think this reveals one of the unique characteristics of philosophical texts. Their points seem to develop and hang together in a way that other disciplines do not. In a more empirical-experimental discipline, there is a base set of terms and phenomena that everyone agrees on and, after learning that set of common knowledge, you can start posing hypotheses that can be empirically tested. After running multiple experiments you then produce results that, again, everybody would agree about what they mean (perhaps I'm caricaturing here, since I've never done scientific research, but this seems broadly accurate). So taking notes in a more scientific discipline lends itself more readily to connecting because researchers in these disciplines often do not disagree about what it is they're talking about, but only about some aspect of what they're talking about. In many philosophy papers, however, the disagreement is about how we should think about, say, truth, knowledge, right action, infinity, subject/predicate relations, semantic reference, normativity, logical validity, etc.
Since these are deep, conceptual disagreements, and the arguments tend to develop in such a way that the points and concepts and premises all depend on each other to be understood, it becomes hard to apply both the principles of connectivity and atomicity. It's hard to atomize points, since to understand some point Hegel makes late in the Phenomenology depends on understanding much of what led up to that point. Though this is especially evident in continental philosophy, I think this is true of papers in analytic philosophy as well to an extent. I recently came across a paper called "Why There Still Are No People". The thesis of the paper is clearly presented in the first sentence: "This paper will argue that there are no people." I haven't read the entire paper, but judging form the first page, to appreciate Stone's claim here requires understanding particular concepts of personhood, identity, psychological connectedness, "what matters in survival," and perhaps even what it means for something to exist. It seems that, before you can begin to atomize, you have to understand how these concepts all work together to lead to the conclusion. Before you do this, you can't even understand what Stone means when he says "there are no people." And you can't create any new connections between this paper and other ideas (beyond perhaps the evident ones in the paper: to positions held by Parfit and Unger) until you can properly understand and atomize each point that the paper makes, or else you risk making false connections. So it seems that often with philosophy you can't just pick out isolated points you find interesting, like the Barbell Method advocates, but you have to understand a paper or book holistically, seeing all or most of its internal connections, before you can start atomizing and connecting it with other papers or books.
Perhaps this is again just to reiterate the point that @Sascha made above: that philosophy tends to require more extensive preprocessing than other disciplines do. I'm still trying to work out what exactly this preprocessing should involve.
How I aspire to read "very difficult texts" in three stages using a modified or extended Bar-Bell Method.
I let time pass. Sometimes as little as an hour sometimes as much as months.
Time pass. A good night's sleep.
I review each note modified or created from the day before. This is usually 3-6 notes. If the book is not too hard then I may have 10-20 notes and I can use this as an indication as to the amount of time to review each note. During the review, I might reword sections, refactor the structure, find more links to notes/ideas already in my Zettelkasten, some of which are in the structure note for the book and some older notes, I may refine the biblo data, I've spent time on secondary research.
I still don't have to be perfect. Now comes what has been key for me. Because I modify the note and maybe some of the notes at the other end of my linking integration, these all show up on tomorrows notes to review. I keep reviewing the notes and making interactive improvements. As my understand improves eventually sometimes after 4or5 interactions through this third step I get to something I can be happy with. The serendipitous thing is that in the future when this note comes to my attending again through its idea being linked with a new note, It can be modified and drops back into the review cycle again.
Will Simpson
My zettelkasten is for my ideas, not the ideas of others. I don’t want to waste my time tinkering with my ZK; I’d rather dive into the work itself. My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon, I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
kestrelcreek.com
Thank you, as always, for your insight Will. Your response made me realize that reviewing notes is something I resist, and perhaps a reason why I feel alienated from much stuff that's in my Zettelkasten. I think this is just a general tendency of mine that I have to get over. Once I finish writing an essay, I never want to see it again. Once I write something about one topic, I want to jump to a new one. I always find starting from scratch more appealing than working with what I have.
I tried to address this problem by making more use of my index as an entry-point. Whenever I go to add a new note, I first look through my index to see if I already have topics this note might relate to, then travel through links until I find a note I have that my new note can expand on. But I'm finding myself resisting this process too, convincing myself that I don't have any related notes so I shouldn't bother going through my index. I think I'll experiment with a daily review like yours and see if it helps me resist this resistance.
This has also made me stop and evaluate my process, so thank you both. Partly for me, it is a matter of time pressure - as I study after work (when I'm not out of a job due to covid) it always seems that reviewing notes is a luxury I don't have... but equally it's something I can't afford not to do.
Second, and a further reason for the first, is the lack of a good technique for extracting and finding notes. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I'd completely skipped the part of the technique that suggests structure notes (or, for some reason, I'd thought these were something done after taking multiple notes in prep for a project) and every time I looked at my archive I felt overwhelmed.
I now have a really great starting point to make tweaks and improvements so, again, thank you both.
No, that is not accurate. Text do not have an intrinsic difficulty but it arises from the reader's competency in relation to the text. If you are competent in philosophy philosophical texts are just texts.
I am a Zettler
@Taylor Reading very difficult books boils down to trying to understand difficult text, so what makes text difficult?
Words - you don't understand terminology the author uses
Sentences - you don't understand how difficult words integrate into sentences to get across an idea or message
Paragraphs - you don't understand what point the author is trying to get at by stringing together multiple sentences
Chapters - you don't understand what the point the author is trying to get across to you through stringing together a bunch of paragraphs (ideas)
Book - you don't understand how the chapters support a larger argument of the book or what concept they combine together to explain
Each of those represent a different level of abstraction that someone can fail at when reading a text. So if I am struggling with a difficult book, I try to pinpoint or get a sense at which level I am failing. If you don't have a sense, then you read a given chapter one paragraph at a time, seeing if you fail at that level. Then try to explain the chapter to see if you get it at that level. Then explain how the chapter ties into the greater narrative of the book to see if you fail at that level.
The second more difficult question, is what to take notes on during the book? That too can be represented by different levels of abstraction.
One Word --> Hashtags that represent the book (e.g. Goodreads genres)
One Sentence --> Often represented by the title of the book
One Paragraph --> Similar to the blurb on the back of the book
Chapter Summaries --> can be a sentence or multiple paragraphs
Concepts within the Book --> can be represented from one word to paragraphs
Thanks @Nick for that helpful framework. It made me realize that most of my struggles are on the Chapter and Book level, and occasionally the paragraph level. But when taking notes I often get caught up in the minutia of the sentence level (e.g. if a sentence is ambiguous, I feel compelled to think through every plausible interpretation of it, so I have them ready to weigh against further textual evidence). This obviously slows me down and makes me miss the forest for the trees.
For some reason I find myself continually attracted to books whose points or significance on the chapter and book level are obscure, at least initially to me. I think it could be because I'm interested not only in learning about certain topics, but when I see an author passionately interested in a topic, I want to understand why a that author finds the topic so interesting or important.
For instance, I'm gearing up to read Deleuze's Difference and Repetition soon. I've read bits and pieces, and based on that decided (against my usual practice) to consult a secondary source in preparation (Henry Somers-Hall's Deleuze's Difference and Repetition). In his introduction, Somers-Hall claims:
That might turn a lot of people off of Deleuze's book, but it just makes me more interested. I want to try to figure out why Deleuze thinks gaining a better understanding of difference and repetition is so important for philosophy and in general. I've realized most of my research interests have developed in this way. Not an immediate interest in the topic itself, but an interest in why someone else is so interested or passionate about the topic. Which in turn usually gets me interested in the topic itself.
I'm not sure if this realization will help me much when reading these books, but thank you @Nick for triggering this piece of introspection.