xela: there seems to be an answer to your dilemma and it does not involve "reading." I can't explain it. It seems that the only person who can is the pro Yoda Norimoto, the inventor of the peculiar term sujiba - a go neologism. He wrote a book on it and gives lectures. But reviews by Japanese people indicate I am not the only one unable to follow Yoda's explanations. He (or his publisher) did subtitle the book with something like the subtitle "the technique that will change 400 years of go theory" and so we have to expect something revolutionary. But revolution is one man's progress and another man's chaos.
I'm in the chaos camp, but having shared a lift with Yoda once, I've always been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and I often try to look at certain situations on the go board through my very blurry prism of what I think he is saying. I have done this often enough, and had enough experiences elsewhere, to think he is on to something.
I put "reading" in quotes because there is a nuance to the Japanese term that is normally disregarded here. Few people seem to stop and think: "why do we say 'reading' and not 'analysis' as in chess?" Subconsciously, I believe, people do recognise there is a difference between the two games, and so different terms are appropriate. But to get full value from that perception, you have to take it further. As Yoda does.
Take what you are doing now - reading. It is very highly unlikely that you are using the 'k' 'a' 't' technique you may have used at elementary school with each word. You are instead taking in each word in a single chunk, and doing fancy things like correcting any mistypes. In fact, it is almost certain that you are taking in whole phrases or even whole sentences in a single swallow and even formulating your agreement or objections as you digest each portion. Go pros can read a go game like that. Amateurs either can't or won't.
It took all of us a lot of time to learn to read text, though, for the most part, those who enjoyed such reading have a feeling they spent less time on it than others. Time flies when you are having fun. But, in reality, I think all of us do subconsciously remember the huge effort involved, and when we do encounter another activity that will involve another huge effort of filling out intuition databanks, we can tend to look for shortcuts. If the activity is fun, and I think music is a good example, people will spend the time, and will end up being able to "read" in the same fluent way. But then the question arises: go is fun, so why am I so unwilling to invest in the time needed to become really good?
I think there are several partial answers. One is that go is a two-person game and the other person is often a ***** who makes moves I was not expecting, moves I don't like and moves I don't understand. Go is hard enough without dealing with an idiot who doesn't play by MY rules! It's very hard to spend time on something when you don't even know what the book, the pro, the AI or whatever is even talking about. Any time you do spend is just floundering. You are trying to learn to swim in a tin bath.
Yoda seems to suggest there is a way round this problem, and step one is to recognise where the sujibas are.
It's a horrible term. It's not just go-specific; it's Yoda-specific. Ordinary Japanese readers don't understand it. It's counterintuitive. It's literal meaning is something like 'flow points'. Flow is a good thing, surely? So these are the points you need to grab? No. These, Yoda says, are the points you need to avoid. His first example is as follows:
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The points 'a' and 'b' are sujiba - points neither side shoud play on. Yoda's starting point is that every stone must be doing some additional work - adding to your position in some way. A black stone at 'a' may seem to be doing some work, but actually it is taking away work from at least one of the two existing black stones, and so the net effect is either zero or negative.
Yoda spends a lot of time on these tiny close-quarter positions - almost the whole book, really. To give just one other example, in the position below, he argues that it is often seen as received wisdom that Black should play 'a'. White naturally extends to 'b' and then, because there is a cutting point at 'c', Black plays there and has a nice thick honte shape.
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Bollocks, says Yoda. If Black just extends to 'c' and then White defends with 'b' again, would Black be so stupid as to play on the sujiba at 'a'?
Spotting inefficiencies like this is the key to Yoda's approach. Since the technique (i.e. spotting which moves are on sujibas) applies to BOTH players' moves, go becomes, instead of a two-person game, a one-flow game. A lot easier to understand.
Obviously it's not that simple. Yoda's next step is to learn to deal with the flow. He appears to want to stress that each move must EXPRESS the flow of the game. Or to put it another way, you must know what work each move is doing. If you describe each move as a hane or an extension or a kosumi, you are describing the move (basically waste of time) when you should be describing what the move is doing.
That is a very large topic, and a major weakness of Yoda's book is that he doesn't get into it at all. Of course, if you are Japanese you can buy books that tell you all the things each type of move does. There is the Nihon Ki-in series of books on "All about sagari" and "All about "watari" and so on. With knowledge of these, Yoda's ideas can make a lot of sense. English=speaking readers can, though with rather more effort, get a similar sort of feel from Fujisawa Hideyuki's books on tesujis. I have encountered readers who just treat them as tesuji problem books, as you can tell by their constant comparisons with Segoe or Go Seigen tesuji books. But that is to misread Fujisawa's books badly. Rather than tesujis PROBLEMS, they should be seen (as with Yoda) as tiny close-quarter positions where you have to avoid playing on the sujibas.
Although I am putting words into Yoda'a mouth (or words into Yoda's mouth I am putting), it may be that his choice of the peculiar term is based on the idea that the sujiba is the point which must be left VACANT for the flow to flow. At any rate, it is worth thinking about.
I mentioned earlier that other experiences had led me to think about Yoda's own words in different ways. I'll illustrate that with one example. I do Scottish country dancing, in which you are up on the balls of your feet, doing little skips and sharp turns for a minimum of 64 bars of music. Calf cramp is therefore a constant problem. But I was given a tip by a professional dance teacher. When it happens, just press on the space just below your nose for a second. It works for me, instantly. Everyone I have passed the tip on to says the same thing, and it also works for cramps while sleeping. One press and I can get straight back to sleep. The lady who told me about it said she thought it worked because your brain (which controls your leg muscles, of course) is put into a state of overload and just goes skewgee. But when you press under your nose, you interrupt the circuitry between brain and leg, and the brain resets. End of problem. That made sense to me (which is why I didn't scoff at the lady and ask if she was pulling my leg!) because it sounds like the meridian (i.e. flow) theory of Chinese medicine. I have since read that this was investigated and confirmed by a team of medical scientists in Switzerland. Keeping the flow going is the way to good health.
That seems to apply in go. But just as I'd be lost if I got cramp in my arm (where to press? - no idea), knowing where all the sujibas are demands a course of study. However, I'd go back to my previous post and point out that by looking at the final position (either of a sequence or of the whole game) like looking at an x-ray can reveal the weaknesses and tumours in your game, and so provide a platform for that study. You will eventually learn to recognise go "words" and go "sentences" and so reading will become a 'cat sat on the mat' rather than a 'k a t s a t o n er? m a t' experience that seems so in favour among amateurs.