michael_nielsen

i started reading textbooks last year and each book often takes me 6 weeks or longer to understand - is this normal? am i doing something wrong? i mean, it only takes a few hours to read a novel by comparison if you have any tips for parsing textbooks quickly i'd love to know!

I think there's a large amount of variation between how information is compressed and presented in textbooks, and of course different subjects lend themselves to different mental models so your mileage may vary with regards to time.

That being said, one thing I've found in my own textbook learning adventures is that building your mental model for the material consciously is a huge help. One thing I do is review the high level topic headers and chapter outlines to get a feel for how the material progresses.