"[Maryanne] Wolf resolved to allot a set period every day to reread a novel she had loved as a young woman, Hermann Hesse’s Magister Ludi."

"It was exactly the sort of demanding text she’d once reveled in. But now she discovered to her dismay that she could not bear it. 'I hated the book,' she writes. 'I hated the whole so-called experiment [of testing whether she'd lost the ability to read deeply].' She had to force herself to wrangle the novel’s 'unnecessarily difficult words and sentences whose snakelike constructions obfuscated, rather than illuminated, meaning for me.' The narrative action struck her as intolerably slow. She had, she concluded, 'changed in ways I would never have predicted. I now read on the surface and very quickly; in fact, I read too fast to comprehend deeper levels, which forced me constantly to go back and reread the same sentence over and over with increasing frustration.' She had lost the 'cognitive patience' that once sustained her in reading such books. She blamed the internet."

From "Just Read the Book Already/Digital culture doesn’t have to make you a shallow reader. But you have to do something about it." (Slate).