It happened with a book I'd been looking forward to for months. I'd bought it, put it on the pile, finally picked it up on a quiet Sunday afternoon. And then I read fourteen pages and realised, with genuine embarrassment, that I had retained absolutely nothing. The words had gone in somewhere but hadn't landed. My brain had been elsewhere the entire time, running through a to-do list, replaying a conversation, doing that restless thing it does when I haven't given it anything interesting enough to stop for.
