Self-torture?

Help! I am reading a book ninety percent of which I do not understand. Yet I continue, often no more than two or three pages at a time. Why?

Could we rule out: that I’m doing this to boast about it in Tone Deaf. This post demands I summarise the book’s contents and that’s far from easy. In my sere and yellow years I shun hard work.

Reality Is Not What It Seems, subtitled The Journey to Quantum Gravity, is by Carlo Rovelli, an Italian theoretical physicist  and international best-selling author. He wrote Seven Brief Lessons on Physics which I have read and - I think - understood. 

So, what izzit? To use his own words "... coherently synthesizing what we have learned about the world with the two major discoveries of twentieth-century physics: general relativity and quantum theory"

More particularly it tries to bring gravity into what went before. And it's the simpler declarative factoids that require chewing. F'rinstance, "the granular structure of space", or "the disappearance of time at small scale", or "the origin of black-hole heat."

Already I'm admitting defeat. Rovelli explains things for non-scientists. Am I asking too much of myself to simplify what he has already simplified? No comfort in “non-scientist”, by the way. For me it requires dedicated concentration and much memory - both qualities undermined by old age.  Still I mainly fail.

So why persist? Perhaps because of the way I earned a living. To ask worthwhile questions I needed - at the very least - to know little bits about lots and lots. Maybe brushing against this arcane world will add to those bits. Or is this self-delusional?