Difficulty of Reading Chess Books

In the chess.com mobile phone app. Practice, custom position. Don't start playing. Just set up the position and then make the moves for both sides. You have your mobile phone with you, so easy solution. I was reading Nimzowitch my system. I found the mental effort of following the game without a board and using the staging positions to be quite helpful for my board visualisation. So recommend others keep practicing.

Also, OP congrats on 2000 Elo for rapid time control.

As a beginner in chess who doesn't want to remain so, I usually pick up books to help with my Chess study. From books by John Nunn to those of Todd Bardwick.

However, what I've noticed is that while these books are from respectable authors, the notations seem to be a big challenge for me. Of course, I can visualize the board at around 4 moves of notations, if it's the opening. For instance, 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 - I can easily visualize this without a board as the Ruy Lopez: Morphy's Defence.

However, when authors give a specific position, typically somewhere around the middlegame, and start throwing like 6 lines straight of algebraic notation, I find it incredibly difficult to visualize at this point, one would suggest, "Well just use a physical board", true, but I can't always move about with a board.

At first, I thought it was the books I was studying, but I later found out, most books are written like this. I'm writing this post in case anyone who's overcome this stage of reading chess books can kindly help out with their strategy.