[free-malloc]

This. Every academic field has its own language, culture, and body of knowledge it regards as "fundamental." To go from reading English to reading a CS paper involves learning these.

And this takes a metric fuck ton of practice. There is no royal road.

IMO, you should probably start with easier material until you strengthen these muscles. Some examples of friendly CS texts that comes to mind are Programming Pearls, the C programming language, or the SQL paper by Codd https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~zives/03f/cis550/codd.pdf

I'd be curious what texts other people would recommend for someone who is a student getting a bachelor's degree in CS.

[barrenko]

The McCarthy paper on Lisps is also interesting and reasonably easy to follow (I'm not even a CS student).

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.html

Full title is - Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine.