Somewhere right now, a pile of unfinished novels—possibly yours or a friend’s—is resting on a nightstand. The spines are slightly cracked, suggesting good intentions, and bookmarks are wedged into pages forty or sixty, never to be moved again. The books did not deteriorate. There was another incident. If they’re being honest with themselves, the majority of people already know what it was.
The debate over whether the novel is dying has been going on for decades, to the point where it has developed into a distinct literary tradition. The obituary is written by someone every few years. Nevertheless, people continue to purchase novels they truly want to read, the books continue to arrive, and the surviving bookstores continue to sell them. Supply is not the issue. It’s not even interest. It’s what transpires, almost without conscious choice, in the fifteen seconds between picking up a book and reaching for your phone instead.
Our ability to concentrate has not been diminished by social media and its never-ending scrolling; rather, it has changed our perceptions of what it means to be focused. Shorter attention spans cause us to give up on longer books as well as the kind of slow, challenging thinking that longer books actually foster, according to a Harvard Crimson article published earlier this year. We’ve become accustomed to receiving the next item before processing the current one. Almost by definition, that is not how the novel operates. It requires you to spend hours or even days sitting with an unresolved issue. That felt normal once. It can now feel almost uncomfortable.
Perhaps what’s happening to the books themselves, rather than just the readers, is the more telling indication. The average length of a New York Times bestseller has decreased from 437 pages ten years ago to about 386 pages, according to publishing data from a 2021 study. That decision is not made by writers and editors in a vacuum. As they read the same culture as everyone else, they see that slow openings are becoming a liability and that a first chapter in which “nothing happens” (i.e., no immediate conflict, no drop-in tension) now carries actual commercial risk. For many readers, the evocative first fifty pages that were once an invitation now feel like a test they can’t finish in time.
This is more than just a publishing fad, so it’s worth pondering. Many works of fiction do their most significant work in the slow-burning first act, where they establish interiority, create a world’s texture, and earn the emotional payoff that follows. Even though it moves more quickly, the result of compressing or cutting that usually feels thinner. We seem to be trading depth for momentum as a group, even if we aren’t always aware of it.
Social media sites were purposefully created to make quitting seem challenging. Neutral features include autoplay, pull-to-refresh, and the algorithm that chooses the next item before you’ve finished the current one. Just enough dopamine is released with each tiny scroll to make the subsequent one seem essential. People were using social media alone for more than two hours a day on average by 2020. In comparison to the amount of time you manage to spend with a book, that is two hours of daily training your brain to anticipate constant novelty. The numbers don’t look good.
Reading speed and page count are not the only things lost in this. It’s more precise—the capacity to maintain a character’s voice from the beginning to the end, to track a debate as it progresses over several pages, and to remain in the middle of an ambiguous situation without demanding a conclusion right away. These are abilities, and without practice, they deteriorate like most abilities. The media landscape of today isn’t exactly a gym, and attention is a kind of muscle.
However, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that those who find it difficult to finish a book can still watch an entire television show over the course of a weekend. That is a hint rather than a contradiction. The problem is not that we are no longer able to engage for extended periods of time. It’s that we can no longer tolerate unguided pacing and slow starts. Both of those issues are taken care of by television. The work is done by the editing. The novel requires you to do it on your own, which now seems like more work than it used to.
This does not imply that the book is complete. Photography, film, television, and the internet—all of which were meant to render the form obsolete—have all managed to survive. It does, however, mean that the experience of reading one—the kind of attention it demands and the patience it demands—must be actively maintained rather than taken for granted. There are still the books. The question is whether enough people will consciously decide to pick one up and stick with it long enough to discover what’s on page 200 despite everything their phone is trying to convince them to do otherwise.
Even though it seems like a small decision, it ends up having a big impact.
Alyssa Bennett as editor at vclib.org, oversees editorial coverage of literary criticism, cultural analysis, political commentary. Alyssa brings rigorous research discipline, in-depth knowledge, experience, and an approachable editorial voice to subjects that most readers find thought-provoking and culturally significant. Her career spans the intersection of literary journalism, political writing, and educational publishing.