Bored Readers

A lot of 1* and 2* reviews on GoodReads lead with the fact that they found a book dull, slow-moving or ponderous.

This is also how a lot of readers respond, by default, to poetry. And also -- not coincidentally -- how I started feeling about ALMOST EVERY NOVEL I'VE TRIED TO READ since the age of 18. Because the dullness of a literary work is almost always more to do with the reader -- what they're searching for and how they're searching -- than it is the work itself.

I figured this out at some point. I figured out that if I wanted to find novels readable again, I would have to be ready to put some effort it. It wasn't that the novels I was reading as an adult were worse than those I'd consumed as a teenager; it was that I'd started becoming more impatient, more easily distracted, and wanting something from books which the majority were unable to supply. But if I pushed forward through enough of a book to work out what it had to offer (there's almost always something), I could eventually re-tune my mind to go in search of that.

I think it's a real shame that this isn't already received wisdom. So many readers seem to think it's the author's job to quickly captivate and entertain them, not realising that no author is remotely capable of giving every possible reader the thing they think they want. This results in silly discussions around books where some people say they were hooked while others say they were bored out of their skulls, and neither group understands the others' reaction.

If I could click my fingers and make a sweeping cultural change, I'd have it so that readers everywhere approach the problem of their own attention span/ability to connect with a book as a project to keep working on. The more you grow, the better you get at *finding* something to keep your attention, if what you really want is to keep learning and enriching your life with a wide variety of materials.