The hardest books to read I have ever read were the works of Herman Minkowski. He was a Polih Jew who lived in France and wrote in German. He once drove Einstein out of the univeristy as unable to comprehend the works. I was referred to these works by a professor who said his notation was the most beautiful. He gave us electromagnetism in four dimensions. He wrote about kernals and convex sets. What I learned reading the intoduction was that I was not going to make the first translation of these works in my head much less for the world. They did convince me to just read a work and not try to understand it even to do the problems at the end of a chapter if it is a textbook. I learned to read Russian and several languages by transliteration. But what did I realy learn. I learned about a fundamental position or index where the mind keeps track. I learned to proceed from the trains of words or formulas that pop into the mind seemly from no where. Your friends are like these place marks. Each has a tie to one of the pictures and you are the owner of the book. Outside on the lawn are other pictures equally indexed but this time only by you.