here's a dirty seceret: we (people that have mathematical training) don't read the notation very closely either. it's very much like reading code: i don't look very closely unless there's a pattern i don't recognize or one that's broken. so ironically reading notation is about ignoring notation :) the problem for you is that you simply haven't had enough exposure to know what the "patterns" are and hence don't have them chunked/mapped efficiently. unfortunately there's no "royal road" here and you simply have learn to enough math to know what these things are but i encourage you to skip notation that isn't intelligible and continue reading. having done that enough times you will eventually actually understand the notation.
I was a college math major, and I can't read math the way I can read text or even sheet music. I familiarized myself sufficiently by writing out my own derivations and treating the textbook as a reference while working the problems. The act of writing the stuff out and manipulating it with my hands is how I learned it.
I think that’s how everybody does it with stuff that’s new to them.
After enough slow progress (“one page per day” can easily be speed reading), parts of what you are reading become what mathematicians call ‘trivial’, and your reading speed of similar texts increases.
I think there’s an analogy with ‘reading’ a chess position. If you watch the ongoing Carlson-Caruana match on https://youtube.com/watch?v=DgvqBjrusIA, you’ll notice that the commenters can easily go through three or four variants in a minute, and call one position an obvious draw, another clearly winning, etc. The reason they can do that is that they have looked at thousands of similar positions, and remember the essential parts of them.
