Status Updates From Diario del año de la peste

I have to read this book for a class and I hate this so much! It takes me 1.5 hours to read fifty pages, and I still don't know what's happening.

“But such things as these were gathered from the letters of merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only; so that things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now.”

This was written over 300 years ago.