This is embarrassing, but here goes. There are five novels beside my bed, all partially read. On my phone, I am partway through 36 audiobooks, which pales in comparison to the 46 ebooks I have abandoned on my Kindle. This doesn’t count the growing pile of advance copies beside my coffee table, vying for blurbs, now that I am a published novelist myself.

At first glance, these stats seem to corroborate Ian Rankin’s words. Commenting a fortnight ago on how easy it is to lose a reader’s focus, when it is fragmented by social media and the news cycle, the writer said: “Maybe as people’s attention spans change the literature will have to change with them.” But as someone who used to doggedly finish whatever I was reading, I now consider it a human right to put down a book that I’m not in the mood for.

I don’t believe that this habit is due to my short attention span – rather more to the feeling of life slipping through my fingers. I’ve always been struck by the Benedictine teaching: “Keep death daily before your eyes.” Oliver Burkeman’s reminder that we each have a mere 4,000 weeks on this Earth was as horrifying to me as to anyone else. And yet at what other point in human history have we ever had such immediate access to so many mind-blowing works of art, whenever we want? A glut of riches awaits me in every........

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