From the Editor’s Desk: Tech Addiction (Premium)

Last November, I re-read Stephen King’s first collection of short stories, Night Shift, for probably the 10th or 12th time. Thanks in part to the timing---I was getting ready to publish my year-end recaps of ebook and audiobook reading---I decided to write it up. And in that article, I provided a mile-high view of my history of reading. Long story short, I was a voracious reader when I was younger. And while I still am, in some ways, my habits have changed in recent years. Maybe in recent decades.

And that, too, is a topic I’ve addressed elsewhere, perhaps in an earlier edition of this newsletter, the notion that our attention spans have declined dramatically, thanks largely to the impact of personal technology. Some key milestones include CNN Headline News, the subsequent generification of local news, the Web with its unprofessionally written blogs, the fall of newspapers and periodicals, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. Whatever. All I know is that I have a hard time reading anything long-form these days. And it bothers me.

And that was part of the reason that re-reading Night Shift made me so happy. It was an easy read, still as good as I remembered it, and easy to get through. These successes are rare, and I’ve been testing my ability to plow through with long-form fiction for years, in part by re-reading very long books like The Lord of the Rings and The Stand, both successfully, and, IT, much less successfully. That one was a struggle.

And maybe this is obvious, but re-reading something you know you like is a bit of a cheat because you can zone out and not get lost. I was reminded of this after re-reading Night Shift because I decided to go back and re-read King’s other short story collections in turn. And this has been much less successful.

Perhaps this should have been obvious, but Night Shift consists of the very best short stories that King wrote before he became a best-selling writer. And his second collection, Skeleton Crew, is not as good. Yes, there are some standout stories in there, The Mist (which is really a novella), The Raft, Word Processor of the Gods, and a few others rise to the level I had expected. But much of the rest of that book was uninteresting to me. It’s like the sophomore slump we see so often with recording artists: Boston’s second album, for example, has a few classic songs, of course, but the full work doesn’t in any way measure up to that band’s debut.

But I kept trying. The third King short story collection is called Nightmares & Dreamscapes. And … yikes. Again, there are a few classics I remember fondly. (Night Flyer and … actually, that might be it.) But much of the rest of it is dreck. And in going through this again, I realized that I had at some point bought this collection in audiobook format because I had never finished the book. And then I never finished that. And now, every time I open the Kindle app and stare at the page, trying to figure out where I am in whatever story---and...