I've been annotating for years now. I sticky note the page. Usually I only need a brief note on the sticky to jog my memory. If it's a useful passage, an important quote, etc.,, I sticky note those too.

Then, I drop the notes onto a Word document for that novel, including the page the quote/info is on in the book. The electronic search is extremely useful not just for keywords but also for reducing a 200-page book's stickies to one single document. "I know it was in 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' I'm sure I stickied it. Let me read through a three-page document on my laptop."

As stated, the vast consensus is that Kerouac was a lousy poet.

However, as turnabout is fair play, let's look at what Vuong is saying. He's making a very nonsubtle observation. It's basically a bit of hack writing in that he took the easiest example he could find. It's like saying Shirley Temple was a lousy basketball player.

Perhaps Vuong's a better poet than he is a writer.

You can find the confirmation of this online by googling: the modern attention span is gone.

Further, in part due to autocorrect, predictive typing, and various outrage types, the capacity to engage in "just think for two seconds" is diminished as well.

Many people have come of age in a civilization in which deep thinking is derided and criticized (as sexist or patriarchal or -shaming or whatever). No thought is given for (what used to be a standard consideration) what might the speaker be saying, behind what the speaker is saying? Is there a broader context? Is the speaker perhaps making an analogy or employing a metaphor or even engaging in sarcastic exaggeration in order to raise a point? (One friend of mine is almost pathologically incapable of considering anything other than, literally, the literal statement made. If I say, "Well, I've said it a thousand times," he will actually start to argue about how I couldn't possibly have said something "a thousand" times. He's not the only one who engages in that sort of behavior, and it is a new one I have only seen in the past 10 years.)

Dickens wrote in a time when people read chapters of a book in serial form (this survived into, IIRC, the 1970s in the U.S. in magazines and still exists in manga magazines in Japan). Modern technology has eliminated that capacity for patience that used to exist in our entertainment intake. Witness "episode bingeing" of television programs. We have such a glut of distractions now, no one can keep up with it all. I still haven't seen all of the Sopranos. And, in order to shift it all, we all have learned to pick up the pace: skip the commercials, order takeout, sit on the couch for seven hours watching. If possible, I suspect everyone would watch at 105% speed, just fast enough that the speaking isn't distorted too noticeably, but enough of an increase to add up over time.

If you don't like Dickens, try this: Turn off all the distractions for two days. No TV, no internet, no socmed. Then pick up Dickens.

I suspect it can be "excused" as an indicator of how absolutely crazy Margaret White is. Probably King made a mistake in writing, but, frankly, it should have been caught by the editors.

Always blame the editors. For everything.