As an academic who studies literary cultures, I am at least as interested in the question of how I am reading, as I am in what I am reading. Last year, I finished a monograph, Satirizing Modernism, about several long and ‘difficult’ modernist novels, such as Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God (1930) and William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955). Just around the time I sent the manuscript off, I began to find it increasingly difficult to concentrate on books. Perhaps a decade of teaching and academic study had finally undermined my passion for the written word? Maybe the constant interruption that accompanies looking after small children had winnowed my attention span? Maybe it was the internet, since everyone blames the internet for everything? After a month or so of silent suffering, I confessed these fears to my partner, whose response was swift: ‘I’ve watched you and you are holding books too close to your face. Get your eyes checked: you need glasses.’ Now bespectacled, I find my love of reading undiminished.