You still call yourself a reader. There is a pile by the bed with a bookmark in the first thirty pages of each. Somewhere in the last two years the evening stopped belonging to you, and the phone was there, and it asked for nothing.
The mistake almost everyone makes here is to restart with something improving, a long serious book chosen as a kind of penance. It fails within a week, and the failure costs more than the two years did, because now you have evidence.
What you need is a book that is on your side. All three of these are.
Italo Calvino · 1979
It begins with you, the reader, settling down to read it. The entire novel is about the act of starting a book, being interrupted, and starting again, which happens to be the exact experience you have been having and failing at. It turns your problem into the plot. Nothing else on this page is as likely to make you laugh in the first ten pages.
Penelope Fitzgerald · 1978
A hundred and fifty pages. One small town on the Suffolk coast, one widow who opens a bookshop where nobody wants one, and a damp old house with a poltergeist in it that the neighbours discuss quite calmly. Fitzgerald wastes no sentence. A chapter costs you ten minutes and leaves you with more than most novels manage in a hundred pages, which is the quickest available proof that the thing you lost is still there.
Mary Oliver · 2017
Poems, which means you can read one standing at the kitchen counter while the kettle goes and have finished something. Two years of not sustaining an hour of attention is an argument for starting with the form that asks four minutes and pays them back in full. Oliver will also send you outside, which the pile by the bed never managed.
Answer the questions and let the Oracle read you
