I agree. I don't think it is bad attention spans, instead I think it is more to do with how engaging the book is. A book could be 800 pages long and it would still be read if the reader finds the book engaging whereas one half the size might be dropped due to writing which the reader had trouble engaging with. Even limited time to read won't dissuade people from reading a long book. If you can only get through a chapter a night but those chapters are a great read then it hardly matters if it will take a few weeks to read the book.
I have been a high school teacher for about a decade and have seen a rather startling decline in, if not "attention spans," than the ability to become engaged in material that is not overtly stimulating. By this I mean books in general, stories that don't shock and wow you, or aren't immediately accessible and easy to read.
Not all students, but as an overall trend. It is rather disheartening.
And yes, I do think it has to do with access and usage of "smart"phones and various technologies that facilitate constant neuro-stimulation. So when you speak of "how engaging the book is," to me it speaks of a generation of young people who have access to endless forms of easy, passive, and creatively bereft forms of entertainment. Yes, we should find more engaging stories to read, but we also need to teach the capacity to
become engaged, and this requires bringing back that old bugaboo: boredom.
I'm not exactly decrepit, but I remember having to fill the boredom of those endless summers of childhood with books, with TV only at night or on Saturday morning and no personal entertainment devices. It was this boredom that gave my imagination the opportunity be ignited. Kids have less and less opportunity to be bored, and thus find
their own means of filling it with creative and imaginative activity. Every kid as their personal "entertainment device," which in my view is doing them a terrible, terrible disservice. We are keeping them from the fertile source of creativity: blessed boredom.
Speaking of which, I decided to read
Lord of the Rings with a small class of 11th graders. We're a few chapters in and so far so good. The biggest hurdle is that most of them have seen the movies, some many times, so I'm trying to encourage to try to "dissolve" the pre-fabricated imagery (as good as it generally was), and enter into Tolkien's Secondary World afresh.
So far (a few chapters in) they are taking pretty well to the book, with lots of lively conversations. Maybe I'm biased, though, as I'm having a blast. Just today I gave a 20-minute lecture on the various orders of beings. It isn't every day that I get to talk about how the Istari and Balrogs are of the same general ontological status.
But with teenagers (and kids in general), the teacher's enthusiasm about a subject goes a long way in perking their interest. The fact that A) the students respect and like me, B) I'm clearly passionate about Tolkien, means C) they're more engaged with the book than if I was, say, teaching
A Tale of Two Cities, which I have no love of (blech...no offense, @
doctorbadwolf 
).
Anyhow, @
Ovinomancer, can you tell me exactly why you think it is a "bad novel?" What specifically? It is the first time I've read it all the way through in maybe two decades, so I can approach it afresh.
