Reading well is an endurance sport, Henrik Karlsson says:
I sometimes talk to people who want to become serious readers and so pick up Kafka’s The Trial or something like that—it is about as pleasant as running a marathon untrained. They often lose their enthusiasm for reading. You have to gradually ramp up your capacity to handle complex ideas and precise prose. I read a few hours a day, and I mostly read books that are comfortable for me to read, well within my range. It is more important to keep the reading experience easy enough that I keep going and going and going, than to always push myself to that edge. By reading within my comfort zone, I gradually build up my stamina and pick up more and more references, words, and patterns of thought, bringing more and more literature into my comfort zone. I remember reading Dostoevsky as a teenager, and I could do it, but it was a chore; these days his prose sounds like an email from a smart friend. It is thrilling when things that were beyond me become easy like that: the world cracks open. If you want to reach the deepest experiences literature provides, you have to put effort into building the stamina and conceptual understanding necessary for complex writing to become transparent to you.