Reading literature and philosophy is both an acquired taste and skill. If you're not used to that sort of thing it may just be that you need to work your way up

Reading literature and philosophy is both an acquired taste and skill. If you're not used to that sort of thing it may just be that you need to work your way up to it. It's a very different kind of reading from pop-anything (-fiction, -history, et c.) Or you may read plenty of that sort of thing but just bounced off Aurelius. Still happens. I'd recommend Staniforth's translation as the best balance between easy-reading and fidelity to the text, if you want to try again. Probably don't need annotations—it's very straightforward by the standards of philosophy. If you'd like an overview of Stoicism to accompany a reading of Aurelius, and you plan to read more philosophy, it's hard to beat Russell's A History of Western Philosophy for a single volume treatment of the field's classics; people complain about its having a lot of opinion in it as if Russell were trying to trick them, but it's pretty explicit when he's describing something and when he's opining so I've never understood what the fuss is.