Can't do it

I'm going to do something uncharacteristic and embarrassing.  I'm going to give up on a book.

The Death Of Adam:  Essays On Modern Thought by Marilynne Robinson




I can't read it.  No doubt it's erudite, coherent and mind-expanding to some readers--but not to me.  I guess I'm too stupid.  If I read it out loud and stopped at every other paragraph to look up a word in the dictionary, I might be able to follow her arguments.  I pride myself on having a decently large vocabulary, but, "tendentiousness"?  "asserted advantage"?  "hermetic"?  "which were occasioned by the promulgation of the doctrine of papal infallibility"?

I give up.  I can follow Stephen Jay Gould, with difficulty, but I always find him worth the work.  I'm not so sure about this.  I couldn't even read the introduction, which is 27 pages long and doesn't tell you squat about what the book is about.  Then I tried a few of the more interesting looking essays, but even the last one, which appeared to be about global warming, didn't seem to say anything deep or insightful.
So I give up.  Undoubtedly it's me.  Or as she would say,
  "...indubitably, the fault engendered by lack of understand in in the mirror of the inscrutable reader."