I suggest to novel-reading students that they only look up those words essential for understanding. There are so many words in any language and you will never need to know them all. You can gain context from the surrounding text. So many non-native English speakers want to stop and learn every single new word in a book they are reading and become so frustrated in the end that they give up.
It is rather different for words related to specialist subject areas at work, but these words tend to repeat and be essential to the topic. Those would be things like eutrophication, littoral states, the difference between derogations and opt outs, for example
I like learning new words though. I don’t remember most of them and some of them I never see again, but language is my first love.
