Andrew Missingham

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I don’t know why, but I can’t read anymore. I used to – I read and loved Dostoyevsky, Camus, Sartre, Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Sylvia Plath. Pretty much all the books I was supposed to. And, like I said, I enjoyed them. But the last novel I think I read from beginning to end was ages ago. If my memory serves, it was either The Last King of Scotland or The English Passenger. Both were fantastic, but neither reignited my reading light.

Currently residing neglected on my bedside table are: Douglas Adams’ The Salmon of Doubt (started, enjoyed, discarded); Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (started, agreed with and irritated by in equal measure, then discarded); Ashley Kahn’s The House that Trane Built (started, not really grabbed and so discarded – sorry Charlie) and Gerd Leonhard’s The Future of Music (not yet started, but the pattern’s unlikely to be broken).

While I’m on this, I’ve got to give an honourable mention to the last book I didn’t finish the most: In the Line of Beauty. I don’t think I got 50 pages into that flowery sprawl about people I couldn’t care less about.

The funny thing is that I read some things all the time. Emails, text messages, newspapers, magazines, websites, reports, blogs and messageboards. I’m probably reading for most of my waking hours. But books? Hardly ever.

So what am I missing? I suppose I don’t get the long, concentrated, luxurious concentration that reading a book gives you. And as I don’t read books, I don’t make the most of the unique portability of a book (the no-batteries bit is particularly hard to beat). But wireless internet has got me used hooked. I dip, delve, explore and interact. If only I could have done that with Alan Hollinghurst, I might have got a bit further (but then maybe not…).

It’s hard not to conclude that my concentration span has got shorter (if it hadn’t, maybe I’d read novels online). But whether this is a bad thing is more debatable. Yes, I’m missing a lot which must be interesting, fun, well-considered and challenging, but if I read more books, I’d have less time for all the websites, reports, magazines and other stuff I read.

Guiltily, I know I prefer to be where I am. How long into the future (for coming generations) this guilt persists, I don’t know. One things for sure – I don’t think I’m going back.