Think digital distractions have killed our attention spans? Think again

The rise of complex TV series and vast novels shows we still prefer commitment to a quick fixThe young woman opposite on the tube last week was lost in Donna Tartt's new novel, The Goldfinch. She personified the truth that attention deficit disorder is a lie. I'm not saying she was weirdly small, but she could have used the 771-page book as a coffee table. She was about halfway through and the covers kept springing back in defiance of her struggling fingers. When she finally got off at Earl's Court she looked like she needed assistance, or a trolley.Why didn't she read Tartt as an ebook? Why did she choose this inefficient delivery system that proves what Philip Larkin wrote at the end of A Study of Reading Habits, namely that "books are a load of crap"? There seem to be two reasons.One, the notion of conspicuous consumption developed by Thorstein Veblen. It's not enough to have a yacht; you have to park it at Saint Tropez harbour for the rest of the leisure class to see. It's not enough to read the latest Donna Tartt; you have to read it in public as a marker of your good taste. Even if it gives you a hernia.Two, books are getting longer in a crazy bid to confer on the literati's waifs an evolutionary advantage over their peers. Books are getting longer, even as articles moaning about our declining attention spans are getting more frequent. Eleanor Catton's recent Booker-winner The Luminaries is 832 pages; the new translation of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, calle...
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