How I’m Fixing My Broken Attention Span

For the past two years, a group of friends and I have gathered each Wednesday to discuss our progress on a famously grueling book, beginning with Infinite Jest and The Power Broker and continuing with Ulysses and Gotham, a 1,400-page history of New York City that often reads like the world’s most tedious Wikipedia article. The Difficult Book Book Club didn’t start as an explicit strategy to wrest our attention from screens, but that’s what it became: We were nostalgic for school, or rather for a version of school that no longer exists, one where you couldn’t count on ChatGPT to concoct a 500-word essay on postmodernism in a matter of seconds or Zoom into class half-asleep with your camera off. Instead, we discuss the 100 pages we assign ourselves each week, seminar style, returning to book after book in lieu of far more immediately entertaining content (or less depressing, as is the case with our most recent read, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich).