I have given up on three famous novels, and I have finished each of them since. The difference was never intelligence. It was approach.
A difficult book is like a garden you are visiting for the first time. If you try to take in every flower on the first pass you will leave with an impression of colour and nothing else. Better to walk the paths once, without stopping, to learn the shape of the place, and then go round again slowly.
So read the first hundred pages without annotating, without looking anything up, and without worrying that you do not follow. Treat it as getting your bearings. Then go back and begin properly. The second reading of the opening is always a different experience: the confusing names have become people, and the early scenes have started to rhyme with the late ones.
And give yourself a companion. A short guide, a reading group, a friend who has already been through it. Nobody climbs alone who does not have to.
