When I was seventeen years old, my girlfriend dragged me to the a movie version of Othello. Only a week earlier I’d made her go to Billy Jack, so it might have been her way of getting back at me. The movie (Othello, not Billy Jack) was two and half hours long, and I was lost for the first half. I got that Iago was a bad guy and that Othello was about to screw up, but otherwise I did not know what was going on.

Midway through the movie there was an intermission, and when the movie resumed after a fifteen minute break, it was if I’d taken a Shakespeare class during the interim. I suddenly understood dialogue that had been gibberish to me only minutes earlier, and I came close to enjoying the movie.

I recalled this old memory, because something similar happened to me last night. For the past week, I’d been struggling with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book The Message. In it, he blends trips to Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine with his belief in the power of the written word. I wasn’t buying any of it. The connections he was trying to make felt forced, and I thought the writing was more concerned with the attractive flow of the prose than with saying anything worthwhile. Had Between the World and Me not been one of my favorite books of the past ten years, I would have put The Message aside and grabbed any one of four other books waiting for me on the table next to my bed.

But I stuck with it, and this evening, from the first moment I opened the book, the message of The Message jumped off the page. I was immersed in the content, and I found myself back to my old habit of making comments in the margins. Through the first eighty-five pages, I’d been bored and confused. Starting with page 86, I was hooked. Coates hadn’t done anything differently, so the change had to be me. As with Othello, I needed to adjust myself to a style of writing not familiar to me.

With Othello and The Message, the transition from confusion to comprehension came suddenly. It doesn’t always happen that way. With one of my favorite books of all time, Walden, it came much slower. It, in fact, took years. I’d tried Thoreau’s classic a few times as a teenager and never got past the “Economy” chapter and its lengthy discussion about the price of nails and garden seed. A couple of years later I slogged through the entire book when it was required reading for an American lit course in college. There I liked it better than Sister Carrie and Bartleby the Scrivener, but not nearly as much as Huckleberry Finn. I did however, realize that Walden was not a book to be rushed through as an assigned reading. I gave it another shot the following summer and then again the summer after that. Since then I have read the book another seven or eight times. I pick it up periodically, because 1) it is brilliant in sections, and 2) it is my fallback book each time I unsuccessfully try to understand The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I am still waiting for the day when Emerson makes sense.

Steven Simpson