How to improve your reading and understanding of code?

The thing that's helped me, more than anything else, has been refactoring.

Take a project (this can be a work project, personal project, open source project, whatever), and start refactoring.

Over time, the more you refactor other people's code, the better you'll "get into their head" and understand their way of thinking, whether good or bad.

The things that's helped me, more than anything else, has been testing and refactoring. You cannot say: "I understand this code" until you know how to break it with a test.

i personally believe in the

"Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand." -Martin Fowler

so my approach would be to find that person and blow his head off so s/he doesn't spead this virus.