Horowitch is absolutely right that attention spans have shortened and the average person is less likely to pick up a book (or read a 7,000 word article) in comparison to past decades, given all the new and shiny distractions offered by technology.

But to call it “the end of reading” is misleading.

Not all books are dense, classic literature like the examples given in her article. I consider myself an avid, voracious reader from a young age and I have never had the patience or interest to read Shakespeare or other classics. It’s not my taste. Give me a historical fiction novel and I will devour it. It is long form prose that requires attention over hours, days (and even weeks). To take the following passage and draw from that the conclusion that young people these days are ushering in “the end of reading” is a long bow to draw:

In a study of English and English-education majors at two regional universities in Kansas, published in 2024, researchers asked students to read the first seven paragraphs of Dickens’s Bleak House. The novel follows members of the Jarndyce family through a lengthy legal dispute over their inheritance. It begins:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

The researchers quoted students’ attempts to parse the passage.

“So it’s like, um, the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no … so everything’s been, like, kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill,” one student said. At least a quarter of the subjects interpreted the figures of speech literally, leading to the inference that dinosaurs walked the streets of 19th-century London. Dickens continues by describing the Lord Chancellor as he is “addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief.” Another student interpreted this passage as “describing him in a room with an animal I think? Great whiskers? A cat?”

If Dickens went to pitch this manuscript to an agent today, he wouldn’t even receive an email back. Not because Dickens isn’t brilliant, but because literature and our taste for it has changed. It does not mean that reading is over.

Storytelling is a bedrock of the human experience.

Reading has changed, and it will continue to change.

Our taste for it will evolve and, in many ways, reflect the broader changes to our world and society. I know countless people who became readers for the first time in their lives during pandemic lockdowns. The ability to dive into a page and enter another world built by our imagination will always have a place.

So please, if Rose Horowitch thinks reading = Dickens, can someone please guide her to a Kristin Hannah novel or a copy of The Spoon and the Sea?

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I am convinced they got married there because Taylor Swift is nothing if not an all-star world builder.

From the crumbs of information we have, the interior looked like a basketball game had never been played there. Taylor and her team turned MSG into a once-in-an-era immersive, magical world.

I’ve always admired Taylor Swift for her concerts, engineering total immersion where thousands of strangers feel light for three and a half hours, trading friendship bracelets. World-building, done right, isn’t about fooling anyone. It’s about creating something so complete that people forget to look for the seams. It’s a talent for building trust and authors should be taking note.

Fiction authors, we should be taking notes.

It’s not how much detail you pile into the world you’re writing. It’s about the harmony between the details and the story it tells. One thing forced or out of place and your reader remembers they’re just reading a book.

Two books come to mind as ‘what good world-building looks like’.

1. Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. This is perhaps the most building world-building I have ever read. That North Carolina marsh was practically a character.

2. The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah. I could almost taste the sand in my mouth.

I am writing my second novel now and I can almost imagine closing myself into a Madison Square Garden dome and thinking: how would I decorate this scene so that the guests, my readers, feel like the one thousand guests at MSG immersed in the* peach and white / garden / countryside / castle of Taylor Swift

*speculative as this is written before we have any photographs.

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These two episodes are a dramatization of real events from October 7. If someone had written that plot in seasons 1 through 4, viewers would have thought the writers lost the plot. It’s extreme, apocalyptic and completely unbelievable.

And yet it happened. It’s our real story which is exactly what made it so painful to watch.

It reminded me of two books.

Jodi Picoult’s Wish You Were Here. If someone had written a novel before 2020 about a worldwide pandemic that grounded every plane, shuttered every city, and killed people at that scale, it would have seemed far-fetched. And then it was real, and suddenly the premise wasn’t fantasy or even pure fiction.

After the pandemic, I also read Nikki Ehrlich’s The Measure. The fictional premise is that everyone over 23 wakes up one morning to find a small box on their doorstep. Inside is an indestructible string, its length determined by how much life they have left. The questions that flow from that range from, ‘what do you do if you know how much time you have?’ to ‘what if your string and your partner’s are different lengths?’. It raises societal questions, ‘would you discriminate against a job candidate or a political candidate whose string was short?’ and ethical questions, ‘would a doctor bother saving you if they already knew your length?’

Having lived through something that would have seemed stranger than fiction before it happened, my mind opened up, less sure about the line between the plausible and the impossible, allowing me to enjoy the book tremendously.

We used to say “stranger than fiction” for a fun or quirky observation or a mildly amusing plot twist in real life.

It doesn’t feel like that anymore.

As my head and heart still hurt from Fauda, I think about how I felt and how my mind opened up reading Wish You Were Here and The Measure the common thread seems to be that it asks you to follow the questions, knowing just how crazy the world can be: What if this happened? What would you do?

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A lot of people know that The Spoon and the Sea is based on a combination of a real story from my family, and my Grandma. The answer to this question is: no. All of the character names are changed and not just for privacy reasons.

I had a lot of fun choosing them and I think Jewish character names are an opportunity loaded with meaning and clues for the reader. The process felt second only to naming my four children.

Here’s why.

My favourite book of all time, Exodus by Leon Uris, gave us Ari Ben Canaan. Literally, lion, son of Canaan. You know exactly who this man is before he opens his mouth i.e. proudly, openly Jewish, strong, loves his country. It’s also extremely on the nose (which reminds us how much has changed since 1958 especially post October 7).

writes about the cost of this disappearing act in People Love Dead Jews, the idea that Jewish identity has always been more palatable for everyone when it’s a little less visible. Jewish names in real life and in books are part of the package.

What contemporary Jewish fiction writers are doing now is something more subtle. But if you know what you’re looking for, it can be fun to peel back the layers of meaning to find the storyline clues.

Character arcs / conflict - Every story needs a conflict and the protagonist’s name is the perfect vehicle to allude to what it may be. In Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, Danny Saunders is a Hasidic boy with a Harvard-bound mind, trapped between his father’s world and the secular one pulling at him. The name Danny as a warm, American, and unthreatening diminutive of the biblical name Daniel wraps up this internal battle. The name does the work of showing you his dilemma before Potok has to explain it.

In The Spoon and the Sea, the protagonist is half-Jewish and half-Arab without truly fitting into either world. Ashi is the ambiguous, pronounceable nickname for Ashar in its Arabic form and Asher in Hebrew. Zooming in even more, the name means happiness. The book follows a son trying to excavate his mother’s story and piece together his own history before it gets swallowed up by dementia. Reaching into those last painful memories is the last-ditch chance at wholeness and, ultimately, happiness.

Surnames - Jewish surnames are a world of their own with clues to a life. Schneider means tailor. Shapiro points to the area of Germany where the family is from. Haddad, like the protagonist in ’s Songs for the Brokenhearted, means blacksmith.

In The Spoon and the Sea, Rose is from a traditional Ashkenazi family living in Golders Green in the 1940s. Her surname is Weiss to help introduce the heritage she is loaded with when she comes into the story. Quintessentially Ashkenazi and meaning ‘white’, the surname Weiss nods to the weight of her surprising romance with a black man from Zanzibar and the layers of tension in an interracial relationship in that time and place.

Israeli fiction and nature-themed names - Names drawn from the natural world are rarely just names. In Israeli fiction this runs especially deep, because Hebrew names drawn from flowers, trees, animals, and seasons are not unusual or poetic choices. They are completely ordinary Israeli names. Think of recent Eurovision superstars like Netta (a sapling), Yuval (a stream) and Eden, like the Garden. What this means for the reader is that an Israeli character’s name is often a piece of the landscape they belong to.

In The Spoon and the Sea, Calanit is named for the wild red anemone that blooms every winter across the Israeli south. It also alludes to the Hebrew word for bride (kallah) and sets up a visual cue for one of the most painful scenes in the book. She is the woman the protagonist wants to marry. She breaks his heart and every time he sees those flowers covering the hillsides, he cannot escape the thought of her.

So next time you pick up a Jewish novel, spend a moment with the names as they pop into the story. Look up what the name means in Hebrew, Arabic, or Yiddish. Notice whether a surname is Ashkenazi or Mizrahi. Jewish names, in fiction and in life, have always carried maps of where a family came from and clues about their life.

What Jewish authors do with character names is what Jewish naming does for people, it folds a whole story into a single word.

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With authors outsourcing research to a chatbot these days, Jodi Picoult is still standing in a bakery to see how bread actually rises before she’ll let a character knead a single loaf on the page.

AI can synthesize everything ever written about beekeeping but it cannot stand in an apiary or get stung. It cannot taste bread that was baked before the dough went from the fridge to room temperature. That gap is exactly why Jodi Picoult’s books will feel alive when almost-but-not-quite-actually-good AI-assisted fiction starts to run rampant, and it’s the reminder every author needs to stick with the elbow grease of real research.

I just finished Mad Honey (went to the top of the TBR pile as I am co-authoring my second novel and I wanted to learn from the best how it’s done) and it reminded me why I keep coming back to her:

1. The OG of multiple timelines and POV. I had her in the back of my mind constantly when switching from post WW2 London to 1950s Zanzibar and present-day Jerusalem. And if anyone can make me fall in love with an African American nurse at the same time that I go into the mind of a white supremacist, it’s Jodi Picoult (Small Great Things).

2. Plot twists. She still surprises me, even after I’ve read almost everything she’s written. While I did pick the killer in Mad Honey, I did not see the main twist coming even with all I knew about the authors (will not say more to avoid spoilers). Most authors with 25-plus books develop a formula you can spot a mile off.

3. Learning new tricks. Yes, Picoult has some conventions that repeat across her body of work (moral dilemma, multiple perspectives, court case often defended by Jordan McAfee) but I appreciate that she keeps challenging herself. Co-authoring (double the work, not half of it), writing timelines backwards etc. Despite finding the thing that works and sells, she keeps making things harder for herself.

4. Great metaphors and similes, which is harder than it sounds. It’s so easy to get these wrong, sound contrived or forced and overwritten. In Mad Honey, there was a heart fluttering like the wings of a hummingbird, a child clinging like a barnacle, the flesh of a plum splitting through its skin, something uncontained. I read lines like that and think, yes, now I feel it even more.

I wrote The Spoon and the Sea thinking about how Jodi Picoult structures her timelines and perspectives as they chop and change. It’s one of the pieces of feedback that means the most, because it’s easy to lose the reader from the grip of the story when you ask them to travel across the world in space and time.

So this is my thank you to an author who still gets her hands dirty and geeks out on cool facts about random things before spinning it into a story.

My favourites: The Pact, Small Great Things, Nineteen Minutes

When my Grandma passed away I missed her in a way I didn’t really have language for. I’d walk into stores and buy something just to have a reason to tell the salesperson a story about her. Someone wise told me grief is love with nowhere to go. That stuck with me more than anything else anyone said that year (like “at least she lived a long life” or “she’s still with you”. True. Thanks. But I miss her).

So I started writing whenever I was said, usually in the mornings when I used to Skype with her (yes, the old-age home had Skype not Facetime).

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about writing through grief. It’s genuinely therapeutic, but at some point you have to pull it back. I wrote every last breath my Grandma took. All of it and every detail of those ten days in the dementia ward. It helped me to write it but a lot of that didn’t make it into the book in the end. There’s a real difference between what helps you process something and what a reader actually wants or needs.

My advice if you’re trying to write something hard, write like nobody is ever going to see it. That’s how you get the raw stuff. My favourite sentences in the book are the ones that started as pages I never expected anyone to read e.g. “the wind blew so hard that pieces of the sky began to fall.” This is how I felt when I realized she was dying. That the sky was going to actually fall on me.

The other thing I didn’t expect was that writing a character based on someone you loved and lost can actually help you let them go. I needed to process those ten days with my Grandma, and then separately I needed to process that she was gone. There were moments where I’d reach a junction in the story and know my Grandma would have done A, but the character needed to do B for the story to work. Choosing B, every time, was its own small step towards letting her go.

Part two. How do you write your own family’s story.

Every single family has a story. Not all of them are as wild as the one that got told at our Shabbat table about the great-aunt from Golders Green in London who married the Chief Justice of Zanzibar.

But every family, especially Jewish families, carries raw material. Events like the Holocaust and others of that scale, belong to some families and not everyone. The smaller markings of a good story e.g. love, immigration, loss, scandal, faith actually make a book worth reading and those belong to everyone.

I am always clear that this is a work of fiction. The bones of the story are true but the connective tissue has creative license, because it has to go into someone’s heart and mind, and that is a key difference between historical fiction and memoir.

Someone once likened historical fiction to a pearl necklace. Each pearl on its own is true but stringing them together creates something uniquely new. This is how I hold my true north when I write my second novel. Lots of true pearls and gems, strung together to tell a new story.

So that’s the honest answer to one line on WhatsApp.

This is the first of many. If you’ve read The Spoon and the Sea and you’ve got a question of your own, send it. I’d love to answer your question too.

1. Big effort that sounds effortless. She does all the research to invite readers into the all-consuming world she has created without rambling on with every interesting fact she found out. This is the hardest part of historical fiction, to make it seem effortless when, in fact, you have been down hours of rabbit holes into times and places and geeking out on all new interesting facts about what they ate, what they wore and how they spoke. Reading her books feels like learning history without trying, which is the hardest thing to pull off.

2. Goldilocks language. She lets the story do the work without flowery language. Her language is beautiful but it isn’t over the top. It’s just enough to make you care about the characters and appreciate the writing without too much that your eyes roll because it sounds like someone prompted ChatGPT to write a metaphor for something. It’s not too much, not too little. Just right.

3. She writes brave women we can actually be. She writes women whose courage comes in different flavours, shapes and sizes. Even in The Nightingale, where bravery was literally in the face of the Nazis and arguably the most 'dramatic’, Vianne is quiet while Isabelle is loud. They make small decisions that show how brave they are and, more importantly, how brave we can be. Living in Israel and raising 4 daughters through this war since October 7, these reminders go a long way.

4. She plays the long game. She’s patient with her own career the way she’s patient with letting her characters ooze rather than dishing it all out in long prose on page 1. I remember Kristin Hannah saying in an interview that The Nightingale didn’t take off right away. It did fine, not extraordinary, until readers found it after another one of her books became popular. I think about that a lot as I run the marathon with The Spoon and the Sea.

So dear Kristin Hannah… thank you.

My faves: The Nightingale, The Four Winds and The Great Alone

The collapse of Australia’s leading writers’ festival is the latest chapter in the Australian Jewish experience since October 7, signaling that even after the Bondi Beach terror attack, little has changed within the cultural and academic establishment.

The decision to remove Randa Abdel-Fattah, one of Australia’s most prominent pro-Palestinian activists, authors and academics, from the Adelaide Writers’ Festival triggered national headlines, open letters, and high-profile resignations. Within days, the board stepped down and the festival was cancelled altogether.

The controversy has been framed as a free speech crisis, even a witch-hunt. It is nothing of the sort.

Abdel-Fattah was not removed because she is Palestinian. She is an Australian-born academic and author who has long been embraced and platformed by Australia’s cultural institutions. She was removed because she has repeatedly promoted rhetoric that denies safety and legitimacy to anyone who believes in the right of the State of Israel to exist.

This is not a case of words taken out of context. At the tip of the iceberg, Abdel-Fattah has said that “no Zionist has the right to feel culturally safe.” She has called for 2025 to mark “the end of Israel” and all Zionists. On October 8, 2023, she changed her public image to a Hamas paraglider, describing the terrorists as “Palestinian fighters who broke out of their 16-year hostage conditions.” She has also been filmed leading children in chants of intifada on the lawn of the University of Sydney.

These statements are not metaphors or policy critiques. They are explicit, dehumanizing, and inciteful. They deny safety and legitimacy to the overwhelming majority of Australia’s Jewish community.

For years, this language was tolerated and rewarded. Abdel-Fattah was elevated as a moral authority on anti-racism and embraced by institutions that claimed to stand for inclusion. That context matters, because it explains why her removal, when it finally came, did not look like a moral reckoning.

When Abdel-Fattah was first removed, it appeared less a principled stand than a panicked attempt to avoid scrutiny. After the Bondi Beach terror attack, institutions that had long championed voices like hers suddenly grew nervous. In their own recorded words, the men who murdered Jews at a Hanukkah celebration condemned “Zionists” as part of their motivation, echoing rhetoric that had gone unchecked in public discourse for years.

What followed was more revealing still. Faced with backlash, the festival did not stand behind even that belatedly correct decision. Instead, it collapsed entirely. In doing so, Australia’s cultural establishment signaled that drawing a clear line between violent rhetoric and violent action remains culturally unacceptable, even after Bondi Beach.

The hypocrisy is impossible to ignore. The same institutions and public figures now invoking the sanctity of free expression showed no such concern when Jewish and Israeli voices were excluded.

Since October 7, Australia’s cultural and academic scene quietly dropped Israeli guests or stopped inviting them altogether. Jewish professionals with any connection to Israel were deemed too controversial to appear. In 2024, Abdel-Fattah herself petitioned the Adelaide Festival board to rescind the invitation to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

There were no resignations then. No anguished statements. No open letters. Just silence.

I know this from personal experience.

Before October 7, I was an Australian-Israeli author publicly celebrated by Australia’s literary establishment. My first novel, The Spoon and the Sea, was a Vogel Literary Award finalist and signed by a leading agency. After October 7, everything changed. Not because I called for harm or violence, but because my Jewish and Israeli identity suddenly made me unacceptable.

That is what it actually looks like to be silenced for who you are.

Against that backdrop, the outrage over Abdel-Fattah’s removal feels jarring. Unlike the many Jewish writers sidelined in recent years, she was not excluded for her identity. She was removed for words she had proudly and repeatedly amplified over many years.

The Jewish community is asking for consistency, not special treatment. If non-violent Jewish and Israeli voices could be excluded without apology or institutional collapse, those same institutions cannot plausibly claim shock when genuinely dangerous rhetoric is finally withdrawn from the public stage.

The real scandal is not that a megaphone was withdrawn, but that it took panic rather than principle to do so, and that institutions crumbled almost immediately when asked to stand by it. This hypocrisy leaves Australian Jews with a stark question: has anything truly changed, or is this simply another chapter in the same story?

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