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I still occasionally run across a word I am unfamiliar with. Especially in writers like Cormac McCarthy, the beauty of McCarthy is that he DOES make me look up words. Norman Rush is a treasure trove of obscure words that nobody knows. I usually don't look them up, but I infer the meaning of them from the context.
Like when you go to the golf course and hear a guy say he sliced the ball, you can watch the trajectory of the ball and guess what slice means, without looking it up in the dictionary. That is how you learned almost every single word in your entire vocabulary -- hearing somebody say it and inferring what it means from the context. "Put your mittens on". Did you look up 'mitten' in the dictionary, or just look at the furry things your mother was dangling in front of you?
When you see a word you don't know, guess what it means and read on. If you guess wrong and it is crucial to the story, then look it up if necessary. If you guess wrong and it doesn't matter, then, well, it doesn't matter. School reading has given you a lot of bad habits to overcome. Read to enjoy, not to write a book report to prove that you got the same thing out of the book that somebody else got. Besides it's just fiction that somebody made up, it doesn't matter how it ends.
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