How should I understand "I will read pages that only weary me"?

Question

This is a quote from W. Somerset Maugham's On Reading as a text in our textbook. And the whole sentence look somewhat like the following:

To know how to skip is to know how to read with profit and pleasure, but how you are to learn it I cannot tell you, for it is a trick I have never acquired. I am a bad skipper; I am afraid of missing something that may be of value to me, and so will read pages that only weary me [...].

Since the paragraph is talking about the skill of skipping, how to understand that he will only "read" pages that weary him rather than "skip" them?

I tried to google the original text but only found some quotes. Could it be a typing mistake of the publishing house?

Answer 1

The author says "it is a trick I have never acquired". In this clause, it refers to skipping. In other words, the author has never learned the skill of skipping.

The author says that learning to skip is a good thing. But unfortunately he has never learned how to do it himself, so even if pages "only weary" him, he reads them anyway.