u/Big_Handle_5956

Specifically, I’m trying to read through Eagleton's ‘Why Marx Was Right‘ and I'm losing my mind.

It's one of the books popularly recommended for dipping your feet in the water before you get into the heavier stuff. And I keep stopping every two or three sentences to look up a word that had a perfectly normal English alternative the whole time. He didn't have to use the word he used. A simpler one would have done the same job, but instead loves to use obscure substitutes.

I’ll be mid-paragraph and I’ve already stopped twice and my brain is in translation mode now, looking up definitions, and I’m not absorbing the argument. I’m just decoding words rather than absorbing the information. The flow is dead. I close the book for ten minutes and I can't remember what the last point was.

Is this just me or does anyone else hit this wall with this specific book and/or other texts? And is there any Marxist secondary stuff out there that just uses normal words for the most part? Because if not, that's a real problem and seems counter-productive to educating oneself of the world around us.

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