First, regarding CLRS: have you looked at the videos of Leiserson & Demaine's MIT course on the subject? Watching video lectures might get through where the bo

First, regarding CLRS: have you looked at the videos of Leiserson & Demaine's MIT course on the subject? Watching video lectures might get through where the book doesn't. I was going to recommend the Knuth book, so I'm trying to better understand your problem. Where, in the first chapter, did your "lack of basics" manifest? If you spell it out in a bit more detail, perhaps we can make more specific recommendations. Needless to say, it helps to make sure your expectations are reasonable. "Reading Maths like you read English" is probably never going to happen-- every mathematician I know can knock through a novel in half the time it takes to read the equivalent number of pages of a mathematics book, and that's in the best case.