Welcome back to Hardcore Literature, your favourite book club.

Deep dives into the greatest books ever written.

Provocative poems, evocative epics, and life-changing literary analyses.

We don't just read the great books. We live them.

Together we'll suck the marrow out of Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy and many more.

We'll relish the most moving art ever committed to the page and stage from every age.

Join us and me, your host, Benjamin McAvoy,

on the reading adventure of a lifetime with hardcore literature.

Hello, everybody. I hope you're doing well,

and I hope your reading is going well. We have another

off the cuff episode, freestyle episode today where I want to talk to you a little bit about the

obstacles facing us readers today. I've put together a list of six obstacles that I think particularly plague us

modern readers. And I have come up with some solutions for you. So if you ever find yourself

experiencing any of these pernicious and common problems, then we have solutions

are plenty for you to break through those pesky reading slumps. And indeed, we all go through them.

We all succumb to obstacles every now and then. We're only human. Now, I believe that we read as a group. We read more voraciously

than most people. We tear through books, don't we? We absolutely love reading. And many of us

couldn't imagine going a day without reading. But even the most prolific, avid reader will come up against life and its obstacles from time to time.

Every now and then, life gets in the way and sometimes it gets so significantly in the way that we find

we go very long stretches without reading or we fall out of the habit of reading. So what are the

six issues, problems that I see, the potential issues facing readers today? The first problem that I

see is attention span. We have incredibly short attention spans. And when I say we, I don't actually mean you or me,

...