In what situations to read physics books?

I am a physics major and planning on pursuing a career in this field. Over years of physics in high school I started hating the course textbooks, because they had too much unnecessarily overcomplicated explanations of simple topics and only used them as a sourse of problems to solve.

I've realized that if I truly want to deepen my knowledge, only lectures won't be enough and I should develop an ability to absorb information from the books and research papers directly using the textbooks we have for our class. But it turned out to be much harder than I thought and I'm just curious, how to actually read and absorb the information from the technical books? I've tried to learn it with math books, but I subconsciously avoid doing so, because we will eventually cover those topics in class, so I didn't see a point of doing so. My question is - is it a good idea to cover the course textbook on my own? How to read those books in a more efficent way, without daydreaming through every new sentence?