On reading habits, fragmented attention, and the books that pull you through
I’ve always been the kind of reader who moves around.
Whenever someone asks what I read, I tend to answer with “a little bit of everything.” Memoirs. Mysteries. Romance. Chick lit. Women’s fiction. Young adult. True crime. I’ve never been loyal to one genre for very long. My reading life has always been a little scattered, a little curious, a little of everything.
Recently, though, I noticed something strange. Not while reading. While tracking.
I built a new reading tracker at the beginning of the year. I log each book I read and categorize it in a variety of ways. One of the columns asks for genre, which means every time I finish a book I have to stop for a second and categorize it.
Mystery. Romance. Literary fiction. Thriller.
After entering a few books, I started to notice a pattern.
Thriller.
Thriller.
Thriller.
Thriller.
It wasn’t intentional. I hadn’t decided to read a bunch of thrillers. I hadn’t set out to do a “thriller month” or a themed reading stretch. But once I started logging them, it was impossible to ignore.
Nearly everything I’d read this year fell into the same category.
And that made me curious.
Because I still like the other genres. I still enjoy memoirs and women’s fiction and romance and YA. None of those have disappeared from my reading life. They just aren’t pulling me the way thrillers are right now.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that thrillers do something very specific that other genres don’t.
They move.
They are built for momentum. Short chapters. Cliffhangers. New information constantly appearing. Every chapter quietly nudging you forward: just one more.
If your attention is fragmented, thrillers are forgiving in a way other books aren’t. You don’t need long stretches of quiet focus. You can read a few pages here, a chapter there. The story grabs you again almost immediately.
Some books ask for patience. Thrillers don’t. They grab your sleeve and pull. And lately, that kind of momentum has been exactly what my brain seems to want.
Part of it might be escape.
Not the cozy kind. I’ve always liked darker stories anyway. True crime, mysteries, things that are a little strange or unsettling. Thrillers sit right in the middle of all of that. They’re familiar territory.
But they also do something else: they make reading easy.
Not intellectually easy, necessarily. But structurally easy. The story keeps pushing forward whether your brain feels sharp that day or not.
And sometimes that’s exactly the kind of book you need.
There are seasons of reading where you want something slow and thoughtful. Something that sits with you for a while. Memoirs do that well. So does literary fiction.
But there are other seasons when what you really want is a book that simply carries you.
You open it. You start reading. And suddenly you’re a hundred pages in.
Thrillers are very good at that.
I suspect this phase will eventually pass. My reading habits tend to wander, and sooner or later something else will catch my attention. Maybe memoirs again. Maybe romance. Maybe something quieter.
But for now, when I open my tracker and start entering genres, the answer is usually the same.
Thriller.
Right now, they’re the only stories that don’t ask anything from me.
They just take over and carry me for a while.
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