[johncarlosbaez]

You need to go more slowly and do lots of examples. Maybe start with

* Karen E. Smith, Lauri Kahanpää, Pekka Kekäläinen and William Traves, An Invitation to Algebraic Geometry, Springer, Berlin, 2004.

and then this:

* Igor R. Shafarevich, Basic Algebraic Geometry, two volumes, third edition, Springer, 2013.