I used to read more

I used to read more.  Recently I've found myself failing to get through Neal Stephenson's latest novel Anathem.  If you know the novel, you know it is big.  I'm wishing I had purchased an e-book version as the tome is sufficiently large not to be readily portable - eg I couldn't fit it into the glovebox of my car.

And maybe it is the shear size of the book that is putting me off.  While I have a book shelve full of similarly sized books, it has been years since I've tackled any of them.  I've have become used to dealing with text in small chunks - blog posts, wiki entries & the grand-master of minute muttering to the world; twitter.  Not only are these sources of text truncated, consuming such text is not as intensive as wading through the mind-bending universe that Stephenson has assembled.

To build up the reading muscles I'm gradually getting through Greg Egan's recent novel, Incandescence.  While not a giant book, the concepts in Incandescence are "out there".

I'm looking forward to getting back to the point where it doesn't take an eon to get through a good novel.