I loved Robbins. It's a great book, and no, it's not hard to read at all. I skipped a lot of the reading first year (phys and biochem texts put me to sleep), but I always read my Robbins. Actually, that was the only text I read this past year. For pharm and micro, I only used review books. As far as second year being harder, I think it depends on the school. It was definitely more work for us, but we had about 2 hours of class/day first year -- sometimes with lab from 10-12 afterwards -- and second year we often had class from 8-12, which was a bit of a shock (yes, we were spoiled :wink: ). The biggest difference for me wasn't the amount of classswork to be done, but just studying for boards and reviewing first year stuff on top of the required lecture material. Many people in my class started doing SOME boards prep around March, and it became kinda crazy at that point to keep up with class at the same time.
I loved second year, though -- it was SO much more interesting than first year and we didn't have lab anymore, which was great. Anatomy lab was a huge drain on time and energy.
As far as path on the boards, it's by far the most important of the seven subjects. I would estimate that 2/3 of my questions on Step 1 were path-related -- either pathophys, straight path, or some other discipline, particularly micro, mixed with path in a vignette. Get a good foundation in path (read your Robbins!!) and you'll be fine.
