I’ll tell you what’s not ideal: selling out your family story for no financial gain, which is the plight facing most authors of literary fiction and nonfiction. They are not only earning incomes that make the minimum wage look like an unattainable dream, as reported by a recent Macquarie University study, but are facing the sudden evaporation of what they once called, in attacks of grandiosity, their “audience”.

It seems that the human ability to concentrate is itself in peril. Reading has been in danger of sudden death before – when I was a kid, television was giving us square eyes – but now, with our phones and the pandemic and Trump and Wordle mushing our brains into the consistency of couscous, we have the science of neuroplasticity to reinforce our anxieties.

The brain itself is being remodelled! In his book Stolen Focus: why you can’t pay attention, Johann Hari popularised widespread research about how the stop-start, multitasking, concentration-shredding influence of digital devices and modern work are changing the brain itself; or, as Nicholas Carr put it 10 years earlier – the last time we were extremely worried about our brains – Google is making us stupid.

During the past year, the new federal government has responded to a persuasive appeal from writers and readers to support literature. But, as the wise Miles Franklin-winning author Amanda Lohrey has pointed out, more good writing means little if nobody is capable of reading. Imagine the future of music if listeners were hit by an epidemic of deafness. The pressing challenge, Lohrey argues, is to restore reading, starting in schools and emanating into communities. A strong national culture is a strong reading culture.

Taken in by the latest apocalypse, I worry most of all about me. I sometimes wonder if we have come to a book-reading precipice, if, like the Soviet Union, a permanent fact of life can disappear in weeks. The dystopian novel is hot right now (as long as it’s an easy read). What if the end came not through a virus or an asteroid, but just through millions and millions deciding from one day to the next that they couldn’t be bothered reading anymore. What if Harry’s book was bought by 10 million people, nine million of whom got one chapter in before deciding that they would never read another book again? Could Harry’s book be the one that sets a new record for killing readers (who are not real people, mind, just chess pieces on a board)?

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As a writer, this is obviously the end of the world, but the reckoning comes more painfully as a reader. I guess I read something like 80 books a year, and have done so for at least 45 years, so let’s say that amounts conservatively to 3000-odd books, or roughly 30,000 hours. According to the 10,000-hour rule, in the time I have given to reading books I could have become a genius in three different disciplines. I could have been a heart surgeon, while also a professional golfer and a concert pianist in my spare time. Instead, I gave that life to poring over ancient manuscripts like a medieval monk. Little wonder that when real estate agents advise you on how to prepare your home for sale, the first thing they say is to get rid of all those books, they turn people off. (With the exception of Harry’s book, which is permitted to continue its life beside the bog.)

If reading just went and died, the sadness would not be for poor old me, but for everyone else and the pleasures they will have missed out on. Forget about one wasted life; what about the many lives you missed out on living?

Whatever is happening to our brain, it remains hungrier than ever to imagine its way into a different life, to travel to a world beyond its own. Imagination drives all that time we spend on those infernal devices that end up withering the imagination that sent us there. Thinking we can do everything more efficiently, we go to Instagram to satisfy the urge to live inside someone else’s world, and we can rattle through thousands of alternative existences in the time it would take to slog through one book. I like to think, though, that the infinite breadth of one billion alternative lives couldn’t make up for one Anna Karenina. Call me old-fashioned. Call me dead.

What readers really need, apparently, if they are to keep on reading, is a positive upbeat ending. So here’s one. Johann Hari’s success with Stolen Focus indicated that he was answering a question many were asking. Why can’t we pay attention? His book sold more than 50,000 copies in Australia, hundreds of thousands worldwide. When people wanted to know why they couldn’t concentrate on reading, they looked for the answers in a book.

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