You have to steel your heart and be ready to die a couple of dozen times till you get the flow of the game :P the first game used to be much more unfair (only recently the lucky coin was added to the first game as well, to help the players). I had to die SO many times before I find a nice strategy for this game. the one thing I can suggest is, try to loot whatever you can loot without endangering yourself and kill only whoever is necessary until you get a second party member. Another thing that helps is saving BEFORE interacting with libraries because loot gets reset with reloads and the game doesn't have that many books in it yet. That way you can reload until you get books that you need.