I bounce off every statistics book around chapter three Nonfiction

The wall is real and it is not about you. Hypothesis testing is where most books switch from explaining ideas to teaching a procedure, and the procedure is genuinely unintuitive when it arrives without motivation.

What got me through was reading two kinds of book at the same time. One narrative book about how statistics goes wrong in the world, which gives you the reason to care, and one working book where you do things with actual data. How to Lie with Statistics is very short, decades old, and still the best cheap introduction to why any of this matters. The Signal and the Noise is the longer modern version of the same instinct.

Then for the doing part: pick a dataset you personally care about, something like your own running times or your electricity use, and answer one question with it. The formulas stop being formulas about nothing and start being answers to a question you actually asked.

Given your actual goal is to follow arguments about studies rather than to run analyses, you might be reading the wrong genre entirely. What you want is a book about study design and how claims break, not a book about computing test statistics.

The questions that let you evaluate most studies are things like: how were people assigned to groups, what was measured and was it decided in advance, how big was the sample, and what did the effect size look like rather than just whether it was significant. Almost none of that requires the formulas you keep bouncing off.

Practical reading tactic: skip the chapter you keep bouncing off and read the next two, then come back. Statistics books are written as if the order is necessary and it usually is not. Confidence intervals often make more sense before hypothesis testing, and reading them in that order fixed the wall for me.

Thinking, Fast and Slow is not a statistics book but it does more for reading studies critically than a lot of statistics books do, because it explains why people, including researchers, reach for the wrong conclusions. Pair it with anything hands on and you get further than with a textbook alone.

One more angle: a short course with weekly problem sets, even a free one, beats a book for this specific topic. The wall you are hitting is exactly the point where passive reading stops working and you need to do twenty exercises to make it stick. That is not a failing of the books, it is a property of the material.