Novels I haven’t finished reading are piling up by my bedside. What if that’s a good thing? | Hanna Thomas Uose

Authors are sounding warnings about the length of the modern attention span, but my series of abandonments is a sign of something else

This is embarrassing, but here goes. There are five novels beside my bed, all partially read. On my phone, I am partway through 36 audiobooks, which pales in comparison to the 46 ebooks I have abandoned on my Kindle. This doesn’t count the growing pile of advance copies beside my coffee table, vying for blurbs, now that I am a published novelist myself.

At first glance, these stats seem to corroborate Ian Rankin’s words. Commenting a fortnight ago on how easy it is to lose a reader’s focus, when it is fragmented by social media and the news cycle, the writer said: “Maybe as people’s attention spans change the literature will have to change with them.” But as someone who used to doggedly finish whatever I was reading, I now consider it a human right to put down a book that I’m not in the mood for.

Hanna Thomas Uose is a writer and strategist. She is the author of Who Wants to Live Forever

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/IDbtdco