Reading in bed at night, my eyelids flicker and the pages flutter, the words drift out of focus and the book falls into my lap. The bedside table lamp seems to dim of its own accord and I'm asleep before my mind has reached the end of the sentence.
Apparently my mind is so fatigued that in the morning I don't remember what information I supposedly digested the evening before. It's impossible to pick-up where I left off in a story because I possess zero recollection of what the characters said or did.
Consequently I can't seem to get beyond chapter one of any book. To tell the truth, I often re-read the first chapter of a novel six or seven times in a vain effort to make some sort of progress. If it's a whodunnit, I never uncover the surprising identity of the murderer. If it's dystopian sci-fi, I never discover whether or not the survivors of Calyx VI manage to repopulate the Zenethian star system. If it's an English tale of social mores, I never find out if the gloomy narrator will finally stop moaning about class barriers and just get on with his boring life.
This is also true of international travel guides. After learning how to leave the airport by train or taxi, I start dozing off before making it into the center of the city. My knowledge of natural history is extinct after the meteorites wipe out the dinosaurs. As far as I'm aware, there are no great feats of engineering after the fall of the Roman Empire.
So I started reading a short story collection, one easy-to-finish story per night, in order to regain a feeling of accomplishment. The shorter the story the better was the plan. But, alas, I didn't find the form very satisfying. Short stories just don't provide the mental nourishment a novel does. In fact, they are so unsatisfactory that I threw the book at my bedroom wall and lay awake all night feeling cheated
