In our busy modern world, reading a lengthy work of classic literature seems almost impossible. If you have 20 minutes free on your commute, say, or at the end of the day, you're much more likely to fire up Facebook or a relaxing mobile game than open your Kindle app � even if you know all the longterm benefits a great book can bring.
Why? Because reading a 500 or 600-page book, especially one written in florid 19th-century prose, is just way too daunting. You can imagine yourself sitting there, re-reading the same paragraph, growing despondent about the hundreds of pages stretching in front of you like a desert with no oasis.
That's what an iOS app called Serial Reader is trying to change. The free app, made by Chicago developer Michael Schmitt, breaks down books into manageable 20-minute chunks, delivered to your phone once a day at a time of your choosing.
Reading this way you can, for example, consume Mary Shelly's Frankenstein in 28 days, Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment in 79 days, or George Eliot's Middlemarch in 146 days. (That may sound like a lot, but did you really think you were going to finish Middlemarch any faster on your own? We didn't think so.)
There's no limit to how many serials you can consume side by side, so long as you think you can keep the thread of all of them running in your head at once. (And we think you can � social media has trained you to multitask well.)
There's also a game aspect: The app keeps track of your reading "streak," so you can be constantly trying to improve your percentages in three categories (day, week and all time). If you've been waiting for the day that reading became a competitive sport, well, that day may just have arrived.
In testing the app, I found the 20-minute reading time to be an overestimate; I consumed all chunks of the books listed above in around 15 minutes, and I'm not a particularly fast reader. Your mileage may vary.
If you find yourself getting into the narrative, you can of course download a full free copy on Kindle, iBooks or dozens of other reading apps, but I'd advise against it. The joy of anticipating the next episode is what keeps us coming back to any serial, including Serial. That's a great feeling to start associating with classic literature, rather than despair.
Since the app is free, it relies on works that have fallen out of copyright (which is no bad thing � the list includes all Sherlock Holmes stories, H.G. Wells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and hundreds of others that you really should have read by now.) There are other apps out there that are starting to grasp the concept, delivering book chunks for a fee, such as The Pigeonhole.
This just might be the reading mode of the future.
My only gripe with Serial Reader so far is that it fails to congratulate, or indeed notify you in any way, when you reach the end of your day's reading chunk; there's also no way to post your achievement to social media. Hey, you just read another 15 to 20 minutes of Moby-Dick in an increasingly dumb world, in the age of Trump, on a device where Facebook and thousands of addictive games were freely available to you! That's worth a gold star, if nothing else.
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