There's no satisfactory book on how to read substantial code. The result is that everyone is a writer and no one is a reader. Can you imagine a situation where almost anyone can write literary novels, but very few can read them?
I've heard this a few other times in the past actually. Are you talking about strategies for getting familiar with a new code base? Or more general like debugging or code reviews?
Do you have examples of books on this topic that you're not satisfied with?