Perhaps you want to read more. Perhaps you feel you ought to read more. Perhaps you just finished rewatching all of Game of Thrones in anticipation of Season 8, and your brain hurts, or rather your brain is completely numb, and with your last remaining synapse, you think: what if I had spent all of that time, or even just a quarter of that time … reading? But reading is hard, you think. At least, reading books is hard. You read social media constantly, but when you turn to a novel, you find yourself skimming, and then texting, and then tweeting.

Perhaps you are a lost cause. Your brain is already rotten beyond rejuvenation, a victim of all that prestige TV and handheld technology. Admit it, you will never read beyond 280 characters again. You already stopped reading this piece!

But I have a solution, a new approach to literacy to counteract your 21st-century attention span: choose extremely long books, preferably extremely long series.

Sometimes the counterintuitive argument is the right one! If you have lost the reading habit and you are a busy person, busy with work and family and television and the internet, you might assume that the best way to regain your literacy is to pick up a short book, maybe even a short story. But you finish that short book and then what? The siren song of HBO’s static angel calls to you, and you reach for the remote. (Or your phone calls to you, and you’re back on Instagram.) All told you spent, say, three hours reading a novella. If, however, you pick up a long book, you will spend far more hours reading, and therefore not watching television. Your brain may have a chance to remake itself in its pre-social media image.

Idiot, you’re thinking, utter moron, the whole point is that no one can concentrate! What difference does it make if we can’t concentrate on a 100-page book, or a 1,000-page book? Either way, we’re not paying attention to the book; either way, we’re tempted to check Twitter. But here’s the thing: it’s easier to keep reading something familiar than it is to start reading something new, so you are more likely to find in the crevices of your life 10 hours to read one long book than the same amount of time to read two or three short ones.

Simply replace reading with watching in that statement and you’ll see that it’s true. Isn’t the ease and allure of continuation why you’re more likely to stream a TV series at night instead of watching a movie? You know you like The Crown, for example. You know who the characters are, and you understand the contours of the universe they live in. Most important, you want to know what happens next. It’s much more enticing to watch the next episode of The Crown than to start a whole new story. Similarly, it’s easier to read the second hundred pages of a novel you’ve started than the first hundred pages of a new one, and easier still to read the next hundred pages. You’re accustomed to the author’s prose style and the characters’ worldviews. You want to know what happens next. The longer the book, the longer you feel excited about reading it.

And that’s why literary series are ideal. It’s much easier to read the first 100 pages of Book II in a series than the first 100 pages of Book I, and so forth, until you get to Book VIII and you’re so comfortable with the world of the novel that staying focused is no longer strenuous. All you’re doing is enjoying the story. Now it’s not so daunting to pick up a book – because it’s not a book, it’s the book you know, the book you trust, the book that long ago made you ask what happens next? You’re confident it will make you ask that question again. That story, unlike some new, unfamiliar story, you can dip into on your commute or over lunch; the barrier to entry is low because you’ve already entered.

A simpler way to say this is: you read books. You binge-read series.

I have put this theory into practice. For the past 15 years or so, I have always been in the middle of at least one series – the literary equivalent of television. Finished series include: In Search of Lost Time, A Dance to the Music of Time, The Sea of Fertility, The Alexandria Quartet, USA Trilogy, the Patrick Melrose novels, and The Hunger Games, among others.

In-progress series include: the Palliser novels, Children of Violence, and The Cairo Trilogy. (I generally read one installment per year.) Meanwhile, I’ve also read plenty of stand-alone novels – the literary equivalent of movies – and they put up more resistance; I often have to wade in pretty far before I feel excited enough about the narrative to read hungrily, whenever I can.

Incidentally, in addition to reading novels, I wrote one – it’s called Talent, check it out! I confess it’s a stand-alone and that it’s rather short. But that’s because I didn’t have the patience to write a long series. Ha.

Look, I won’t pretend it’s a cinch to read In Search of Lost Time. It isn’t. But I found every installment easier to approach than the last, and – this is key – later installments more alluring than any of the distractions that might have stopped me from opening a book.

TL;DR: if it’s TS you’ll just go back to Twitter, but if it’s really L maybe you’ll start R-ing again.