Most people have a small collection of books they have meant to read for years and abandoned at page forty. Often these are the books they most want to have read — the long classics, the dense non-fiction, the famously difficult novels. The problem is rarely interest. It is pacing and the absence of any plan.

Commit to a tiny daily dose

The biggest reason hard books get abandoned is that people try to read them in normal-sized chunks. Twenty pages of a thriller takes fifteen minutes. Twenty pages of a difficult book might take an hour, and after a long day there is no way that hour is happening.

Cut the dose to ten or even five pages a day. A 600-page book at ten pages a day finishes in two months. The ten pages a day is achievable on the worst days; on good days you go longer. Either way the book moves forward instead of staying frozen on the shelf.

Read consecutively, even briefly

Difficult books punish gaps. If you read for three days, then take a week off, you have lost the names, the geography, and whatever momentum you had. Returning means re-reading or pretending you remember things you do not.

Five pages every day beats fifty pages every other week. The continuity is doing more of the work than the page count.

Use a companion if needed

For the famously hard books — Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, In Search of Lost Time — a good reader's guide or annotated edition is not cheating. The author is not there to grade you on whether you got every reference. A guide that explains the mythology of a chapter or sketches the geography of a fictional city saves hours of confusion and lets you actually engage with what is interesting.

Reading with a podcast or a book club working through the same text also helps. Hearing other people's reactions makes you notice things you missed, and the social commitment to discussing a chapter on Friday is excellent motivation to read it by Friday.

When to give up

If you have given a book a hundred pages and feel nothing — not enjoyment, not curiosity, not the glow of a hard thing slowly opening up — it is okay to put it down. Not every famous book speaks to every reader, and the time you save by abandoning a book that is not working is time you can spend on a book that is. The goal is reading, not finishing every book you start.