How to Read Theory: 8 Strategies for Understanding Complex Texts
It seems to me that the hardest part of reading is keeping your brain in one place. Reading is one of those tasks that continually challenges and pushes a person’s awareness, experience, and knowledge well beyond the threshold of normal day-to-day life, and with that practice comes a tendency to wonder and wander mentally with every new piece of input — to begin to put pieces together that, in some cases, never belonged in the same puzzle until fairly recently.
Having a brain that makes such connections is a joy and a curse, I think. There’s a little hit of dopamine in every intersection, no mater how strange. It’s the kind of shock that has a person sitting up suddenly and reaching for a pen so you can scribble something in the margins in hopes that you won’t forget that connection later. On the best of occasions, that scribble becomes a tiny paragraph on its own as it flanks whatever narrative inspired it. I love those moments. Their only frustration is the tendency to run out of margin in which to scribble. Margins never seem big enough for my ideas.
But getting to that point can be hard. Reconciling the connections with the narrative demands a bit of a library of experience from which to pull, not to mention the self doubt we all carry with the idea that our own menial world view is worthy of appearing in those margins.
To ease that suffering, I advocate for the reading of theory. It’s one thing to connect the Brontes to each other, but it another thing altogether to connect Vilette and and that thing you read that one time about semiconductors and the labour involved in their production. (Yes, that is an extract from one of my margins).
But how does one do that exactly? Isn’t theory really hard?
Yes, theory can be intimidating, but it isn’t always. While taking the edge off theory is one of my Readist missions, you don’t need direct instructions from me to get started in the grand adventure that is building your own library of theoretical knowledge.
In hopes of getting you off on the right foot, I offer the following tips and tricks that have helped me build inner-library. You don’t need to try them all, but I would suggest these approaches to any of my students (and I regularly do).
1. Read with a pen(cil)
Whatever you read, whenever you read, do it with a writing tool in hand. These are the most ancient of reading tools and come in many colours, sizes, styles, etc., and any of them are perfect for marking up your ideas. You can underline, you can doodle, you can write names, thoughts, connections, you name it.
But if you don’t have a pen, you can’t make your marks, and those marks are the point of the matter. From a cognitive perspective, the act of writing old-school-style is wildly important to the retention of knowledge and the synthesis of ideas. This is why so many people in the productivity space are reaching for commonplace books (more on that later).
You’ll note I do not include a highlighter in my list of tools here. They have their place (and they are pretty), but I do not include highlighters in my personal reading practice. They just don’t do the job. The exception, however, is for my writing practice: I highlight lines I can see myself using in my essays and articles so they are easy to find. Call them in situ pull quotes if you will.
2. Read Widely and Without Prejudice
It’s all well and good to read what you like (and I encourage you to do that too), but if we stick to what we like we risk missing out on other ideas. Think of it like the algorithm on Facebook, and how quickly it can become (or became) an echo chamber of your own thoughts and opinions.
What’s lost in that situation is not only a sense of a world that is full of diverse perspectives, but all the ideas and thoughts and opinions that create that diversity of perspective. Maybe we disagree with some of those perspectives (and indeed, maybe we should), but they will also bring us face to face with our own ideas, challenging them into new forms, new strengths, new spaces.
So yes, read what you like, but spike that reading with the other side of the story. Stuck on the classics? Cool. Pick up some Stephen King. Read the Dragons of Pern series? Flip through a copy of The Economist.
And speaking of which …
3. Not all theory is academic
There are gazillions of ideas out there, well beyond the confines of the various academic presses. Especially in the age of platforms like Substack, where democratizing knowledge is the whole point. There’s even ideas to be found on more traditional social media platforms like YouTube.
Craving something old school? Check out alternative presses like Verso. And let’s not forget the humble heirs to the paper periodical and zine, a format which has its roots in the spreading of ideas both for and against the established powers-that-be. From the Economist to Vox, there’s always something to learn from the contemporary era’s various news outlets.
The point here is: yes, getting your Foucault and Fanon in is a good idea, but so is hitting up other sources. Just don’t forget to bring your pen.
4. Accept you won’t get it all. Ever. And that’s a good thing.
Repeat after me: no one gets it the first time.
This is as true for complex theory and philosophy and the like as it is for the basics. And to be totally truthful: you shouldn’t get it all the first time through.
Theory is one of those things that improves and changes meaning every time you encounter it, whether that be in the page or in your own brain. That’s one of the cooler aspects of theory. It’s something that rewards re-encounters, and part of that is getting more and more out of it every time you dip your toe back in.
This is true even with the theoretical companions bundled into the Readist Reading Guides, even though those are selected and intended to be accessible and easy to understand even if you’re unfamiliar with all the concepts included.
So don’t worry if you don’t get it all on your first pass. Or your third. Just start with the main argument, take what you can, and keep going.
5. Start with secondary sources first.
Beyond the long lists of venerated scholarly theoretical texts — the Hegels and Foucaults and Marxes — there lurks a whole market full of introductory and secondary texts that exist for no other reason than to make theory easier to understand. And there’s no shame in them. In fact, I applaud anyone willing to take the time to bone up on the basics before digging into a dense piece of theory (even if, as noted above, it’s okay not to understand the whole thing at first).
There’s introductions, commentaries, and guides relating to almost anything your theoretical heart can wish for, and they’re just waiting to explain the key ideas and contexts behind the world’s great thoughts and their thinkers. Indulging in such texts ensures you have a scaffold to work from before you dive into that harder material you’ve been eyeing up.
6. Keep a theory journal.
Call it a commonplace book, a compendium, scrapbook, hibino nichi, whatever. Keep yourself a journal of insights.
This particular tip will sound pretty familiar to anyone who’s spent more than a few minutes in the productivity YouTube corners. And while I will admit having visited that neck of the woods often, what often seems lost in all the leather-bound-fountain-pen aesthetic of the thing is the value of what goes inside such books.
And whatever you call them and whatever format it is, what’s in them is magic beyond annotation. Your journal is where you build your own thoughts based on what you have read and what you are reading. This is where reading becomes a praxis.
As you’re reading across texts, you’ll find a lot of ideas pop up that deserve preservation. Put it in your journal. You’ll notice recurring themes, motifs, and other patterns that connect to your personal experience. Put that in your journal. Quotes that remind you of other thoughts you’ve found in other works. Put that in your journal.
Capture your mind, and refer to later when your bored or inspired. You’ll be amazed what you’ll find, even in retrospect.
7. Don’t skip the history.
Every theory has its moment. Its situation in time. Marx was writing in the industrial revolution. Plato in ancient Athens. Each of these contexts has wildly differing priorities and attitudes. Respect that. It’s important. Not just for understanding, but for getting the most out of the theory you’re reading.
As a bonus: understanding when and why a theory emerged makes it much easier to understand. A brief biography of the author, or an overview of the intellectual and sociological climate is often the key to difficult passages.
But where do you actually find this context? Start with the basics: Wikipedia is your friend here, especially for quick biographical sketches and historical timelines. Don’t be snobby about it. Those entries are often written by scholars and include excellent bibliographies to follow up with. University press introductions are gold mines too; books like “Marx: A Very Short Introduction” or “The Cambridge Companion to Foucault” exist precisely to give you this scaffolding.
Pay attention to what was happening around the theorist, not just to them personally. What wars were being fought? What technologies were emerging? What social movements were gaining momentum? Foucault’s work on surveillance makes different sense when you know he was writing during the height of Cold War paranoia. Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” hits differently when you understand he was grappling with both the rise of fascism and the new possibilities of film and photography.
And don’t forget about intellectual genealogies: who was each thinker responding to, arguing with, building on? Theory is fundamentally conversational, even when the conversation spans centuries. Understanding that Judith Butler is in dialogue with both Simone de Beauvoir and Jacques Lacan changes how you read Gender Trouble. Seeing how bell hooks builds on and critiques Paulo Freire illuminates both thinkers.
This is as true for fiction as it is for theory, no matter how “dead” the author may be. For example: can you imagine trying to understand Tolstoy but thinking he was American? Or reading Vonnegut like a Victorian? So why would you read Foucault like Plato? or Hegel like Karatani? I’m name-dropping here but … you get the point. Context is key.
8. Analogies are the secret sauce.
If the saying goes: “you never really know someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.” The same goes for theory. If you can’t use it, do you really know it?
This is where using analogies as a way to apply your new theoretical knowledge really drives home what you’ve learned. When you take theoretical frameworks and test them against real phenomena, texts, or situations you know well, you make the abstract theoretical ideas tangible. This helps you understand their practical implications and limitations.
This idea is quite similar to the Feynman technique, which is a learning method named after and used by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. The core principle of the technique is that true understanding is demonstrated by the ability to explain a concept simply, often using analogies and plain language, as if teaching it to someone with no prior knowledge, such as a child. This approach is based on the idea that if you cannot explain something simply, you do not fully understand it yourself.
So test yourself, and using analogies to do so is an easy way to do so. Bonus points if you write your analogies in your fancy new theory journal.
So there you have it. Eight ways to dive into the vast, sometimes intimidating, always rewarding world of theoretical reading. But here’s the thing: all the tips in the world won’t replace the fundamental act of picking up that first text and wrestling with it, pen in hand.
Theory isn’t just academic exercise or intellectual showing off (though it can certainly feel like both sometimes). At its best, it’s a set of tools for thinking differently about the world around you. It’s what lets you see the connections between a Victorian novel and contemporary labor practices, between ancient philosophy and modern technology, between your own daily experiences and the larger systems that shape them.
The beautiful paradox of theory is that the more you read, the more you realize how much you don’t know—and somehow, this becomes thrilling rather than discouraging. Each new framework you encounter doesn’t just add to your knowledge; it transforms everything you’ve read before. That dense Foucault text that made no sense six months ago suddenly clicks when you encounter it after reading some feminist theory. The Marx you struggled with becomes clearer after you’ve spent time with contemporary economists who are still arguing with his ideas.
And yes, you’ll have moments of frustration. You’ll encounter passages that seem deliberately obtuse, arguments that feel circular, and concepts that slip away just when you think you’ve grasped them. This isn’t a bug in the system. It’s a feature. Theory resists easy consumption because the ideas it grapples with are genuinely difficult. But that resistance is also what makes the moments of clarity so exhilarating.
Remember: you’re not trying to master everything at once. You’re building a library of ideas, one book at a time, one margin note at a time, one unexpected connection at a time. Some of those scribbled insights will turn out to be dead ends, but others will become the foundation for entirely new ways of seeing. And if you want help, my Reading Guides and Mentorship programs exist for exactly this journey.
So grab your pen, find a comfortable chair, and dive in. The world of theory is vast and sometimes bewildering, but it’s also alive with possibility. I’ll meet you in the margins.