Like all the best human transactions, serious reading asks a lot of you, but delivers far more in return.
We seem to be losing our patience for long novels in general. We spend so much of each day grazing on mental junk food that our appetite for serious literary nutrition is shrinking. That’s why I’m making a pitch here for Great Big Books in general – for those literary whoppers that make unashamedly large claims on our time and attention...
Meanwhile, online magazines have started warning us how many minutes each story on their home page will take to read. The times specified are always piddling. Four minutes. Six minutes. Maybe 10 if the story’s really earth-shaking. The implication is clear: reading is a luxury we can barely afford. The sooner a writer gets out of our hair, the better.
But if we don’t want writers in our hair, they’ll never get into our heads. Day by day, online content providers are whittling down our attention spans. One way to resist this assault on our mental infrastructure is to lay aside our devices and slow-read a brazenly time-consuming work of fiction. I’m not saying it has to be by Proust or Joyce. It can be by anyone, as long as it’s made of paper, lasts for at least 500 pages, and won’t emit some kind of buzz or chirp or chime every 30 seconds...
It was an unfamiliar feeling. We’re so used to bingeing things that we seem to have forgotten what the word “binge” means. Bingeing isn’t something you should want to do as a way of life. At the end of a binge, you feel unhealthy. At the end of a great book, you feel nourished and improved. Like all the best human transactions, serious reading asks a lot of you, but delivers far more in return.
— David Free, from “We’ve forgotten how to read long novels – and we’ll pay the price” (The Sydney Morning Herald, October 6, 2022)
