lemmata wrote:one cannot claim to understand a book when you cannot follow any of the text.
To start with the trivial: there are lots of problem books with problem diagram, correct answer diagram, wrong answer diagram and maybe one variation diagram. It is extraordinarily easy to understand almost all of such a book.
There are also lots of books similar to problem books but having a short text for each diagram and every text contains some sequence and reference to one, two or three particular moves and obviously little else. It is still very easy to guess much of the text's contents.
The next difficulty is with similar books and chapters. Each chapter carries an unknown heading and a (very) short(!) introduction paragraph. From the diagrams, it often is very easy to guess the contents of heading and introduction paragraph by noticing the common contents of the diagrams.
About only books with (much) more general text or more than one principle / general advice per chapter can pose a problem for an experienced diagram-only reader. Such good books are infrequent among those Asian books easily available in the West or in easily found Asian bookstores.
(And then there are many easy to understand books I avoid such as game selections without or sparse comments. Nowadays, I prefer databases. The sparse comment diagrams were interesting as a kyu player, but now I learn too little from them.)
I posit that one can follow slightly more than nothing by having a glossary of go terms (such as aji, atari, tesuji, influence, thickness) available on a sheet of paper. One would have to be a fairly strong player to do this.
No. What one needs is an ability to perceive structure, such as the same topic in all diagrams of a chapter.
it is impossible to get too much out of a book without reading the text,
This can apply to books relying heavily on text other than trivial diagram comments.
especially if the book is by Takemiya, who has a unique view of the game compared to his peers.
Understanding Takemiya is particularly easy for me (for obvious reasons):)
The text in go books often tend to consist of positional analysis,
The texts in go books tend to AVOID proper positional analysis! Maybe there are hints "Black is better" or very selective mentioning of strategic aspects ("Black has a wall there, so..."). However, so far I have hardly even seen a proper positional analysis in books about that topic - consistently using an analysis that would at the very least describe how to assess a particular position's territory, with which means (such as imagined sequences) to determine the territory intersections etc. and then show the whole board position with the territory intersections marked. (Detailed positional analysis of aspects other than territory is even rare.)
If the text in books referred to careful positional analysis, then it should demonstrate that by showing what it claims in analysis diagrams as mentioned above. Rather than doing positional analysis, most books with some positional discussion are highly selective about what they discuss at all. While this can make much sense when a book has particular topics, it does not mean that what is discussed should be called "positional analysis". It could often be called "highly selective study of a few particular aspects of positions". E.g., a study that shows sequences proving the existence of some particular aji. Then typically books proceed with showing possible follow-up sequences starting from the current position, but this is about strategic planning and hardly positional analysis.
Are your books very different from that and do they, e.g., always show for every discussed position diagrams with territory intersections marked and text explaining why indeed those are the territory intersections?
I personally learn a lot from the text of go books,
Of course, one can learn a lot from text IF there is such text that can be learnt from and IF there is a sufficient amount and quality of such text and IF the text is in a language one knows.
!!