Dusty jackets

"Now that we have the wherewithal to read uninterrupted through the night, how many of us avail ourselves of it?" asks Howard Jacobson in his diary column for the Guardian. These days, he finds himself eschewing the pleasures of a good book, instead glued to a TV screen, and I suspect he's far from alone. A book at bedtime has become a thing of the past for me too, but my poison is the internet - I don't necessarily read any less than I used to, but the reading matter is articles like Jacobson's rather than full-length works of fiction and non-fiction.

Dismayed with his own behavioural habits, Jacobson argues that "you feel you've earned your sleep when you've wrestled with the angel of meaning at the end of a long day", and the science suggests that late-night screentime is potentially very bad for you. Time to make a concerted effort to switch off earlier and stop the books on the bedside table gathering dust, methinks.

(Thanks to Hugh for the link.)