I've been reading Chesterton's Orthodoxy since October, and while I've really enjoyed the book, it's taken me about four months to attempt reading the last chapter. I seem to be terminally stuck.
For one thing, this is not a book you can read in gigantic gulps. There have been moments when I've been tempted to read a second chapter after finishing a first, and each and every time this has proven to be a mistake. Too much thinking is required. I'll make it through four or five pages of that second chapter, and then realize that I've no idea what I've just read, and this is rarely a good realization when it's a book you are reading voluntarily. I admit, I didn't understand much of what I read in Eagleton's Literary Theory, but that was a different sort of voluntary reading.
Michael recommends, quite sensibly, that I not choose such high intensity reading just before it's time to go to bed. This is why I never could have made it in graduate school. I've just about decided that I'm not the right kind of intellectual.
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