One great idea in Stolen Focus is to read fiction to improve your focus. Hari provides a solid scientific argument to support this idea and also explains why reading for pleasure is on the wane and how that is connected with the general erosion of attention.

I don’t need to be persuaded to read fiction but I’m happy that other people are seeing its importance, too. I’m currently trying to decide which novel will be my first read of the new year because I’m very superstitious about my reading. Start the year with a great read, and the whole year will be filled with wonderful reading experiences.

This is a good book but, unfortunately, the author hasn’t fully conquered his problems with focus. The book suffers from being quite unfocused. For instance, Hari mentions climate change every 10-15 pages, which – important as the subject is – doesn’t have a whole lot to do with focus. Stolen Focus flits around between such unrelated topics as Jair Bolsonaro, a 4-day workweek, UBI, Trump, Rosa Parks, and many others. It gets quite dizzying to observe Hari lose his battle with attention pulverization right there in the pages of his book.

Still, the book is good and necessary. Yes, Hari is very left-wing. But we are not primitive organisms who can’t find a boundary between an author and his work. The point Hari makes in Stolen Focus is that we can and should make efforts as individuals to improve our focus but it’s an uphill battle because poor focus isn’t an issue only of individual failings. It partly is but there are other things at play. Surveillance capitalism, overmedication, poor eating and sleeping habits, moronic schooling traditions, parental inattention – all this destroys the capacity to focus. It doesn’t matter if the person saying it is left- or right-wing. It’s still true.

Hari is so severely addicted to his devices that he had to buy a box to lock them in there because he can’t abstain from using without a physical barrier. I’m not nearly as addicted but I understand and feel the deepest compassion. I respect Hari for not pretending that he managed to solve all his problems. The book is honest and it doesn’t promise easy solutions for what is an endemic, debilitating issue.

A younger colleague I’m mentoring says he’s struggling with an inability to focus. And then I notice that he never even disabled the notifications on his phone. This is akin to saying that you are struggling with alcoholism while loading bottles of cognac into your shopping cart.

People complain about things like they are out of their control but wouldn’t make the simplest little changes that are completely in their power.

I’m reading another book on focus and will post the results later, by the way.

More Ukrainian Christmas art for you on this Christmas morning:

All this talk about the death of the author is dishonest anyway. There’s absolutely no chance Wahala, for example, would have been published if the author were white. If anybody even attempted anything like it, there would be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Not a word of the text needs to be different for the text to be unpublishable just because of the identity of the author.

Here, by the way, is an article in the National Review bemoaning the belief that literary criticism shouldn’t care “what the writer intended to say with this book.”

I’m one of those critics who don’t care. Because it’s a waste of time to wonder about what anybody intended and how that intent translated into action. I suspect that Nikki May, the author I discussed in the previous post, wasn’t trying to write about horrible, mean bitches from hell in her novel. She probably finds her characters endearing. Or maybe she’s deeper than I credit her and actually intended to portray them as irredeemably nasty. I have no way of knowing but why does it matter? Whatever she intended or didn’t intend won’t change my perception of these characters as horrid and the novel as highly entertaining.

My goal in writing, teaching, and talking about books is to get people excited about reading and engage them in discussing what we read. This is so much more interesting than trying to psychoanalyze authors. If a writer didn’t intend to be funny but I find a book hilarious, why is my laughter less important than his intention?

Also, it really cuts both ways. If we divorce the writer from the product of the writer’s talent and don’t ban books because their authors were imperfect human beings, then how can we remain obsessed with authorial intentions?

Wahala was one of the New York Post books of the year, so I had to check it out and it didn’t disappoint. It’s a great mommy-lit novel about four mixed-race women in London. The women are daughters of despicable Nigerian fathers and white mothers. And they are all messed up about men.

The problem that the female characters of Wahala encounter is that black men are deadbeats and crooks while white men are doormats and wimps. And the women themselves are entitled, horrid brats. If you ever felt a bit down on yourself, read this novel. Whatever your faults are, you’ll feel like a saint compared to these characters.

As the women in Wahala abuse their pathetic white husbands and miserable children or are abused by shifty black boyfriends or fathers, they consume boatloads of interesting Nigerian foods. There are even recipes included at the end of the book!

This isn’t high art, of course, but it’s great entertainment. However, the phenomenon the novel points to is true. I have no idea why it’s so but women from unfortunate countries do tend to exist only in two modes: being eagerly mistreated by compatriots and acting like total bastards toward kind, earnest men from more civilized places.

Leaving aside the racial angle (which is hard to do because the author makes sure you never forget about it), the novel shows us how ugly the life of uncontrolled consumerism is. If you don’t have some limiting factor – be it religion or an intense intellectual life – unchecked wanting turns you into a horrid person. The female characters of Wahala are so nasty because there’s no organizing principle in their lives, no moral code, no purpose. They do atrocious things and never even realize it. This is what living in a moral vacuum looks like, and it’s scary.

Raising a child means having the most mundane actions lit up by a glow of magic.

You know you’ve been overusing your phone when your index finger twitches in a swiping motion during every long pre-Christmas toast.