Reading books outside the contemporary period makes me appreciate how culture affects my understanding; when I was in high school, I used to read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft, who was a writer by profession who got paid by the word. Thus his prose tended to be full of flowery language and excessive description, and understanding that aspect of his writing helped me get through it (I still recall the slow madness of Alonzo Typer in his eponymous diary). When I read stuff written natively in English and published since, say, the 1960s, I have no problem getting through — we all have the same underlying assumptions; reading Dickens is for me more difficult than translated Yukio Mishima, as it’s a world wholly foreign to me.