I've been finding it harder and harder to concentrate on

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I've been finding it harder and harder to concentrate on words, sentences, paragraphs. Let alone chapters. Chapters often have page after page of paragraphs. It just seems such an awful lot of words to concentrate on, on their own, without something else happening. And once you've finished one chapter, you have to get through another one. And usually a whole bunch more, before you can say finished, and get to the next. The next book. The next thing. The next possibility. Next next next.

Still, I am an optimist. Most nights last year, I got into bed with a bookand started. Reading. Read. Ing. One word after the next. A sentence. Two sentences. Maybe three.

And then... I needed just a little something else. Something to tide me over. Something to scratch that little itch at the back of my mind - just a quick look at my email; to write, and erase, a response to a funny tweet; to find, and follow, a link to a really good article, or, better, a thread about recommended books on /lit/ (which I might even read most of. The list of recommendations, not the actual books). Email again, just to be sure.

I'd read another sentence. That's four sentences.

It takes a long time to read a book at four sentences per day. And it's exhausting. I was usually asleep halfway through sentence number five.