My honest advice if you are reading something (especially something academic or non-fiction) that you don't understand is to read it again. And again, if you need to. And again.
I read the same three or four pages of the new network analysis paper probably six times yesterday, and at some point I had the math notation page on Wikipedia open for reference, and I don't have a subject matter expert's understanding but I do get more of it than I did when I started. And the next time I read it I'll understand it more.
Literally work it out sentence by sentence if you have to. You can learn how to understand things, even if it takes a lot of iterations.
