Why our shrinking attention spans are killing the thousand-page novel for good

I recently read Frankenstein, or tried to. It’s a novel of galloping pace I’d always loved yet I found myself skimming, skipping over passages, checking emails, watching cat videos. What is happening to me?

Are skinny books the way of the future? Picture: News Regional Media

When it comes to book trends, skinny is dominating. It’s a reflection of changing reading habits, of fracturing attention spans in a screen dominated world, of an inability to focus on a sustained piece of prose. We’re craving shorter books of around 100 pages. It’s a huge change from those doorstoppers of old, those bricks of classic tomes and airport novels. A Little Life, Dune, Middlemarch, War and Peace, A Suitable Boy. All whoppers, some topping 1000 pages.

The spine has slimmed in the bookshops and my writers of choice, now, all produce compacted little powerhouses. Clare Keegan, Samantha Harvey, Han Kang, Annie Ernaux. Do I buy them for the concentrated dollop of pleasure? Perhaps. Give me a Saturday afternoon of reading delight, and just that, because there’s so little time now, so little focus. I can feel my brain morphing; my ability to focus fracturing. It’s all around us. We’re losing the skill to read, watch, consume in a slow, sustained way. It’s an inflection point in the neurological history of humankind. The monster is unleashed. The Time of the Great Unenlightenment is upon us.

Podcaster, Scott D Clary recently reflected, “The most underrated skill in 2025: Being able to focus for more than 20 minutes. Not checking your phone. Not switching tabs … Just you and one task. This used to be normal. Now it’s a superpower. While everyone’s attention is shattered into 30-second clips, the person who can think deeply for an hour owns the future. Protect your focus like your life depends on it.”

Guilty as charged. Concentration is shot. I recently read Frankenstein or tried to, deeply. It’s a novel of galloping pace I’d always loved yet I found myself skimming the book, checking emails, watching cat videos, skipping over passages of landscape description. I never used to read like this. What hope do our children have? I can sense it all around us. The change, bowed heads a portent of a buried future. No depth. All surface. Everything spoonfed. Young minds held hostage by the tech companies. Obscenely. Reading feels like hard yakka now for so many of us, especially our youngest. It’s a tragedy. Writers will have to change our way of writing to cater for this new, bitsy, scatty mode of consumption. I’ve always dreamt of producing a crisp little 100 pager, a concentrated depth charge of a novel like Red Badge of Courage, Silk or Orbital.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey runs to just 144-pages.

But it’s hard to write in a distilled manner; novels are so often big, flabby, stretching things. Alan Hollinghurst once despaired, “I tried desperately to be Penelope Fitzgerald and get everything into 180 pages, but you just can’t do it.” Marlon James said recently: “I hate people who can pull off short novels. When I do a detail, it’s 70 pages.” Meanwhile, the grim statistics pile up. TED Talks are becoming shorter because people’s concentration can no longer last the distance. Novelist Elif Shafak said recently that in her first TED Talk, she was given a 19-minute guideline. A decade later it was 13. The explanation? “The world’s average attention span has shrunk.” Once upon a time, the internet was word-based in a saturation of blogs and forums; now it’s visual-based with snapshots and snippets. We’re not so much readers anymore, but viewers. Studies show that 30 per cent of Americans now read at the level of a 10-year-old.

Ah, we of the past, with our bookshelves and predilection for the spine and paper stock. I miss the absorption of being lost in a long tome; living and breathing them, over weeks. Miss those times when I’d carry a brick of a book everywhere, barely raising the head from a train seat or park bench. I fear that reading books, and long books in particular, will become an esoteric hobby, like listening to classical music.