Have you noticed a change in your reading habits? Do you read less? Do you struggle to become immersed in a book?

It’s a real problem, this sad decline in an ability to concentrate while reading.

Is it laziness? Are our brains a muscle that’s gone flabby? It takes so little effort to turn on Netflix and hang out with Walter White, Daenerys Targaryen, Don Draper, Mrs. Maisel, their rich visual worlds coming to us fully formed, requiring nothing of our own imagination, only a pair of eyeballs and minimal consciousness.

I remember being thirty-five and locking myself in the bathroom with “Outlander,” my four kids roaming the rooms below with pocket knives and fruit roll-ups and I didn’t care. I remember being forty and making the tactical mistake of cracking open “The Lovely Bones” at 10:00 pm. and IdidnotpauseforsleepuntilIfinished, just as the middle school bus pulled up to our mailbox.

But somewhere, something changed. A few years ago, when my book group chose ”A Gentleman in Moscow,” I’d begin reading and find myself transformed not into a little girl at the Metropol Hotel but into my Grandma Welton sitting in a straight-back chair, head back, soft palate whiffling and ruffling, book good for nothing but catching drool.

The same sleepy pattern happened while reading The Library Book, Educated, Little Fires Everywhere, A Man Called Ove, White Teeth, The Underground Railroad, My Brilliant Friend, The Boys in the Boat, and other popular books.

I have realized the disturbing truth that the just-one-more-chapter craving of my youth is like sex. The fever has dissipated with age.

Just shoot me now. If I can’t stay awake for Count Alexander Rostov, just shoot me now.

And how will I spend my last evening before my execution? I shall read something that halts my slide into slumber. I will pick a book that comes closer to approximating the Netflix phenomenon, something dynamic, modern, stimulating, and superb. Like one of these books below. Each of them is structured in snippets that can stand up to a fractured attention span. Each one is vivid, imaginative, and wonderfully different.

These three books also stand up to rereading. They can be left open on the kitchen counter, inviting your eyes to wander through familiar pages. That’s what I’m doing right now, and that’s where I’ll leave you. The stories are calling out their sweet siren song and off I must go.

The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard

Ahhhh! Jo Ann Beard wrote this book in 1999 and I just discovered it last summer?! It was recommended by a couple of instructors at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and no wonder. This collection of essays reads like fiction, with mothers smoking, daughters flirting, lovers leaving, dogs dying, but it’s a memoir, and a groundbreaking one too, in my opinion. I think it earns a place among the greats of that genre like Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild,” and Jeanette Walls’s “The Glass Castle.” Read it and see if you don’t agree.

Beard is a ballsy woman, strong, not afraid, until her marriage dies a slow death and then she changes, and becomes very afraid. One chapter recounts her solo drive through Alabama — sweltering heat, broken a/c, pitstop for gas, and then out of nowhere, a random dude aggressively pursuing her down the highway — and I felt prickly with fear all over.

Another chapter, wedged in the middle, is the essay titled “The Fourth State of Matter.” I don’t want to ruin your experience reading it for the first time. But that single essay, which was first published in The New Yorker in 1999, is proof of this writer’s genius. Please read it and tell me if you aren’t flabbergasted by Beard’s ability to defly, without sentimentality, relay shocking events, life-changing moments, like a photographer who is also a poet and a quilter. There. Doesn’t that sound good?

The Stories of Mary Gordon

Short stories might be the perfect antidote to a fractured attention span. And Mary Gordon, let me say, is a sure thing. She’s like your favorite hair stylist, who knows the shape of your head, the texture of your hair, and consistently delivers exactly what you and your mood need. I think she wrote my most favorite short story of all time — the kind of story one always remembers, and moreover, can repeat easily. Which I did recently at breakfast. Everyone listened raptly to this ordinary story about a podiatrist, a dog, and a kid with a gimpy leg. (It’s the second story in the collection.)

Gordon’s tone is conversational, her plots deceivingly simple, and her characters complex, vivid, and never predictable. It is effortless reading. But not facile. Never shallow. Each chapter is immersive and different and deep. Sometimes they’re dark. And clever. Put dark and clever together in the same room, and you will be reminded of that other master teller of tales, Roald Dahl.

Be warned, though, that if you get this book from the library, you and your spouse or your housemates will squabble over it. Buy one and rent one. Everyone’s happy.

Imagine Wanting Only This by Kristin Radke

I hope you love this graphic memoir as much as I do. Reading it is an intriguing experience. You turn the pages quickly and easily, which belies how very very long this book must have taken to produce. The grayscale drawings are a little minimalist and stark and they convey a strong sense of place. You will travel through Chicago, Green Bay, Wisconsin, Gary, Indiana, Detroit, and Europe with the author as she grows into the artist and writer capable of producing such fine work. She falls in love, she experiences loss, and then sets off to explore the connection between abandoned places, destruction, death, and the temporary nature of life.

"Since Gary, Indiana, I'd been consumed by the question of how something that is can become, very suddenly, something that isn't, and Italy is a place where ruins are restored and honored with red ropes and tourists, a place where we live within what might have been abandoned elsewhere."

There is a fascinating chapter about the Peshtigo Fire, which occurred near Green Bay, Wisconsin on the same day in 1871 as the Great Chicago Fire, but with much deadlier consequences.

I am full of awe for this book. Every page represents hundreds of decisions Radke made as an artist and writer. Can you imagine that?