Here was a different kind of reading: disciplined, complex, unfathomable. Books that had to be assigned, searched for in long drawers of index cards, located on a shelf, and then, somehow, read and understood. This was the impossible part, because each book was nearly impenetrable, texts so dense with learning that they felt like intellectual black holes, informational molasses. Every single paragraph, every single sentence, depended on a backlog of knowledge to support my understanding. I could barely break in.
