How to comprehend hard books like Walden?

Pre-College Issues High School Life
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<p>I'm reading Walden right now and I find it rather hard to comprehend at times. Not so much because of the vocabulary but because of his style of writing and what I think equivocal meanings. What is the best way to comprehend abstruse books? I'm pretty sure many of you will say just practice but then, I will ask, how should you start to practice? </p>

<p>I read the introduction and I found it really interesting and I understood the majority of what was said. However, when I got to the actual piece of work, I could only understand less than 40% of what was being said, if not less. </p>

<p>Just to give you an example of what I don't understnad. Hopefully it is enough without the surrounding context. "Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is."</p>

<p>I say to myself... ***? Mabye it is because I understand things better when they are "spelled out" instead of hidden beneath the text. It sure seems like that is how Walden is written.</p>

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<p>i felt the same way when i read it
sparknotes and cliffnotes all the way!</p>

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<p>Lol, I relied too much on sparknotes last year but I felt that I never got to understand the piece bymyself. Don't excerpts from Walden show up on the SAT? I just want to be able to handle other hard works and get inside the authors brain to figure out what they are trying to say but how?</p>

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<p>Get a quite place to read without any distractions. Make sure you aren't sleepy or anything like that [reading on your bed would probably be a bad idea]. Read more slowly than you usually would, re-read if you have to and think about what you read. Take the time you need to process.</p>

<p>If you keep reading I'm sure it'll get easier and easier to understand Walden and other authors. I've never used Sparknotes/Cliffnotes/etc. so I have no opinion on those. >_></p>

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<p>The way I'm getting around Pride and Prejudice's WORDY conversations about gossip and general BS is paraphrasing what they say to how it would actually be said in present times. Make sure you can paraphrase what is being said, that part is important.</p>

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<p>Sparknotes will actually explain the chapters really well.</p>

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<p>Yeah, but the thing is my teachers will call that "cheating." =[ I've heard some students get caught before lol. </p>

<p>Do you think this is a good method? Read it over (lightly) the first time around and write up the reading logs and then go back and re-read, if time allows for more deeper meanings. </p>

<p>I think trying to get deep into meanings the first time will leave tired and I'd probably give up lol.</p>

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<p>My freshman year English teacher actually told us (because we got into some pretty heavy stuff, ie Jane Eyre, Frankenstein, Great Expectations, etc.) that if we didn't understand it to keep reading, but to use SparkNotes as a companion to the book. Which is ideally how they're supposed to be used anyway.</p>

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<p>Walden is not that tough of a book to understand. Thoreau does a pretty decent job of making his points in it.</p>

<p>As for the novels of denser substance, such as Dostoevsky, Bronte, and James Joyce (although I would shocked if he was on any high school curriculum), don't be ashamed to use companion guides like SparkNotes. That's what they're there for. Not all teachers like them though; don't let them see.</p>

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<p>SparkNotes, or another good outline, is a great resource. If you want to reduce your reliance on outlines, one way to attack confusing sentences is to figure out the structure, cut the extra words, and then piece it back together. For example, with the sentence you gave:</p>

<p>
[quote]
"Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is."

[/quote]
</p>

<p>1) Structure: There are two main parts to the sentence, separated by a semicolon. The first part starts with "old people" and the second starts with "new people". So Thoreau is probably going to try to contrast two different personalities/behaviors.</p>

<p>2) Cut the extra words: in this sentence, things like "perchance", "as the phrase is", "with the speed of birds", "in a way". Cut it down to the basic, bare bones of the sentence - once you understand that part, you can add the other words back in to clarify the author's meaning further. So now your two parts look like this:</p>

<p>
[quote]
"Old people did not know enough once to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going;
new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe, to kill old people."

[/quote]
</p>

<p>3) So what does this mean? It'd be easier to interpret in context, but here's a shot. The "old people" start a fire, but don't know enough to add fuel to keep it going. The "new people" add fuel, which propels them forward. By now you should definitely get that the fire is not literal, if you didn't before. If someone starts something but can't sustain it, it will fail. You need to figure out how to add new fuel, so to speak. Thoreau is basically talking about new ideas and innovation, and how they keep society moving.</p>

<p>4) Now you basically understand the sentence, but there are still some confusing parts - like, what's this about killing old people? You can start adding back the words you removed in order to clarify these details. When you put back in the "in a way" and the "as the phrase is", it's clear that Thoreau doesn't mean literal killing - he means that the innovative, original new people will supplant the old people.</p>

<p>Does that help?</p>

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<p>I am only saying what my DD who has read Walden told me when I asked your question, "It's all about the loon" Don't know what that means, I hope it helps you</p>

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<p>Quaere, thanks a lot for your breakdown! Hopefully I'll be able to do that myself with the book. </p>

<p>I agree the sparknotes is a good resource (I used it for Julius Caesar lol), but if you want to get better at finding the theme and understand the author you should try to interpret the book yourself first right? I used to just read Sparknotes and their summaries (which is bad). I don't know how I should tackle these books. Should I read it first myself, write about it, and then reread it again or just use Sparknotes to see what they say?</p>

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<p>definitely use sparknotes</p>

<p>i had no clue what was going on when i read it, but my teacher was really good (though gave an unfairly large amount of assignments--don't get me started). For most of what was required, especially in the beginning, she'd go through it with us and point out important things, literary devices, meanings, etc. It helped us get used to what to look for and stuff and then she's assign a few pages at night and the next day we'd go through as a class what we found and add to our own books (we had photocopied versions). The final product was what looked like a complete mess of highlights and pen and notes and arrows. We did that for all of Economy and then had two choose 2 other sections to analyze by ourselves and complete a paper on. </p>

<p>examples:
<a href="http://i14.tinypic.com/4mt6h43.jpg%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://i14.tinypic.com/4mt6h43.jpg&lt;/a>
<a href="http://i19.tinypic.com/62r6smo.jpg%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://i19.tinypic.com/62r6smo.jpg&lt;/a>
<a href="http://i17.tinypic.com/4tsxag8.jpg%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://i17.tinypic.com/4tsxag8.jpg&lt;/a>
<a href="http://i17.tinypic.com/4qgk9r7.jpg%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://i17.tinypic.com/4qgk9r7.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>The Great Gatsby was even worse--post its on every single page I tell you.
But then I actually liked that book :P</p>

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<p>Wow.. you did all that highlighting for every page in the book? I can't even understand what you highlighted. For example I don't see what is so humorous about "I, on my side" of the first picture =/</p>

<p>I only understand some parts of it like mabye 20% now lol</p>

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<p>hehe, I can see where you got your username, "a la mode" :P</p>

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<p>Wowee Zowee, that is some intense highlighting :D. It would distract me so much lol.</p>

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<p>lol. even I don't still get it. it made sense when she explained it to us :D
but we highlighted everything for the Economy chapter but not the other ones. We analyzed two of the other ones independently. </p>

<p>If you PM me I can send you my paper, but idk how much it will help. I chose to do the chapter "Solitude." idk if you'll be reading that one. And the assignment was to relate it to 3 of these 5 themes/relationships she gave us</p>

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<p>I don't read very often (pretty horrible reader), but I found Walden to be VERY intriguing and it was much easier to decipher the book once I was into it. So my advice would be to understand where he's coming from even if you don't agree with the doctrines of Transcendentalism (I'm atheist)</p>

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<p>Thanks alamode for the paper! Can someone help me define this quotation? Or at least tell me what you think it means? </p>

<p>“Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.” (P. 232)</p>

<p>Thanks again!</p>

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<p>mintymojito, two of Joyce's books show up on the Modern Lit and the Arts curriculum at my school, but they're the easiest ones, and I'm not taking that class anyway.</p>

<p>Anyway, in Walden, Thoreau will give long, drawn out paragraphs with many examples and cultural references that will usually either seem to be sheer brilliance or complete nonsense depending on your perspective, but then he'll get to the point and summarize a couple pages in a sentence or two. Keep an eye out for those spots.</p>