THE sun is shining, out-of-office is on, it’s a perfect time to read a good book but you don’t want to. Use one of these excuses to squint at your phone instead:
‘The text’s too small’
After several attempts to use a two-finger gesture to zoom in, you irritably decide that with all its densely-packed words in daunting paragraphs, lack of tabs and unwillingness even to impose a comforting pop-up, this book is refusing to meet you halfway. What are you meant to do, get your glasses? They’re all the way inside. F**k that.
‘Too many pages’
The comforting endless scroll of social media means you have no idea how much you’re reading, even when you’re an hour deep into a Reddit thread about Heated Rivalry ships. Books, on the other hand, can’t even be held without revealing an intimidating number of pages and exhausting you before you even start, so you don’t.
‘There’s no comment section’
When you come across a villain online there immediately follows a long comment section where hundreds agree on what a monumental arsehole they are. Bad guys in books require you to make your own judgement and then stick with it all the way to their eventual comeuppance. Justice is delayed too long when you’re ready to condemn now.
‘It’s too slow’
Page after page of description of some bloody Victorian workhouse. Can’t they just jump-cut between one paragraph and the next? Include explanatory captions? Couldn’t this be condensed down to a 15-second Instagram reel? What was Charles Dickens thinking, not pivoting to short-form video?
‘There’s no tits in it’
Social media these days has, like all other media, discovered the lowest common denominator and it’s boobs. Novels? You’ll struggle to find one which has an actual picture, even in medical textbooks. Compare that to any app. Even LinkedIn has tits these days.
