Monday, November 7, 2011

My Attention Span is Less than a Middle Schooler’s…


…Or I’m too old to fully get into tween novels. This is a problem that’s been plaguing me for a while now: whenever I read a middle grade novel on the subway I get so distracted by stops and people getting off the subway and a girl’s pretty shoes that all of a sudden I’m three pages into Chapter 5 and can’t remember what happened during Chapter 4! For some reason I just can’t concentrate fully on the text of tween novels when other things are going on. Has my attention span failed me? Am I too old to relate to the text? Are middle grade novels written poorly? To the last point—of course not! I love tween books: Savvy, When You Reach Me, The Benedict Society are all some of my all time favorite books. Not to mention classics like Anne of Green Gables and Little House on the Prairie. And yet, I don’t have a similar problem reading teen books on the subway. I get so lost in the world and characters that, at times, I’ve almost missed my stop! So what is it about middle grade novels? I don’t have an answer—does anyone have the same problem as I do? A theory? Or, best yet, a solution? I need to reclaim my reading time!

No comments:

Post a Comment