Literary Vice

If you are concerned that you can no longer read a full book because your attention has been fragmented and blown apart by social media and the internet, you are not alone. The feeling that sitting and slowly absorbing a dense novel might be a kind of torture – or an impossibility akin to a couch to marathon pace – is shared. And you can make arguments about whether long form reading needs to be privileged over something like long form listening or watching (though if my experience is any guide, I don’t bring focused attention to those tasks either – I long form listen while I’m also running or cleaning, and I haven’t watched a full length movie without scrolling at the same time in years). But for me there is something particular about the long, deep read – distinct from audiobooks (and I know some of you will want to fight me on the hierarchy of physical book v audiobook – ‘it’s all a story!’ whatever whatever). Something to the mindfulness that requires (invites? encourages?) doing nothing but reading.

So if that’s a hard(er) experience for you than it used to be let me offer that you are not alone. And that for some, the answer to the challenge of concentration has been romantasy. The portmanteau genre bridging romance and fantasy first came to my attention with Fourth Wing (which I read but can’t find the review) and at the time I thought “this is ridiculous,” and also “I cannot put this down.” Is it the erotica? Maybe. Or the relentless plot pace of Something Is Always About To Happen That Is Very Dramatic? Maybe. It certainly isn’t the quality of the writing or the character development.

The same is absolutely true of Dani Francis’ Silver Elite a sort of hunger games meets fifty shades of grey meets harry potter (in that there are elements of near-children battling while at school while also having explicit sex). Though to my credit (*she said with some defensiveness*) I came to this book through the recommendation of the New York Times and so had some vague sense that it would be #literary and #worthy

If you are okay to free yourself from ideas that reading need be an entirely intellectual exercise – or that you need focused thematic development for something to be good – you might just find true enjoyment in Silver Elite. There’s a bit of work to get oriented to the world building and some gymnastics to sort out the character hierarchy, but once you’re through that it’s just a fun romp through plot and romance. A bodily exercise of enjoyment rather than a brain one.

And the strangest thing will happen. You’ll be standing in line, or waiting between meetings, or finished putting the kids to bed and instead of reaching for your phone to scroll as if there might be an answer to the abyss at the bottom of the feed, you instead want to reach for your book. And you start to read promising yourself just a few pages before you get on to doing X or Y and that beautiful, magical feeling of two hours disappearing happens and you return to this world reminded of what it is to be focused, absorbed and transported.

Now for suggestions for books that do the same without requiring me to blush deeply while reading it in public. Or better still, the things I need to do to finally, at last and fully break my phone addiction. Yes, I’m open to throwing it down a well and never using the internet again.