A few months ago, I stumbled across author Nicholas Carr being interviewed on NPR about his new book, "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains."

I've long suspected our brains were undergoing rapid evolutionary changes because of the Internet. I bought "The Shallows" and was quite surprised to find it wasn't the predictable diatribe against technology I expected, but a fairly nuanced, logical and deeply insightful exploration of brain plasticity, the cultural assumptions and practices embedded in reading a book, and how various means of acquiring information have shaped human intelligence.

Nicholas Carr is an excellent writer who conveys complex information clearly. It also helps that he has a sense of humor. So, why haven't I been able to finish his very well-written tome in the two or three months I've owned the book?

These days, I consider it sufficient to have read 100 pages of a 375-page book. I'm not going to hoist a banner declaring "Mission Accomplished," as if I've actually achieved something, but I figure I can always finish it.

It's not that I'm bored or that the author has somehow disappointed me. To the extent that I understand "The Shallows" less than 100 pages in, I suspect that I'm proof of Mr. Carr's argument that our attention spans aren't what they used to be -- and it scares the living daylights out of me.

Whole forests could be replanted with the books I've only partially plowed through this year. When I picked up Andrew Bacevich's "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War," I swore it would take me no more than a week to read during my bus commutes to and from work. It didn't work out that way because I suddenly had an irresistible hankering to read Charles Bowden's "Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields."

Before I could finish Mr. Bowden's darkly poetic book, I was on to Ishmael Reed's highly provocative "Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media." While schlepping through Mr. Reed's book, I was suddenly smitten by Christopher Hitchens' memoir "Hitch 22," a book that caused me to laugh out loud because it is so criminally droll at times.

Once I noticed the books were piling up only partially read, I made a resolution to avoid bookstores until I had significantly reduced the current pile. I even boxed up dozens of books I knew I would never get around to reading and took them to Half Price Books in Monroeville. They gave me a very good price for them and I felt as if a big weight had been temporarily lifted from my shoulders.

Suddenly, I had a few discretionary dollars burning a hole in my pocket. It wasn't long before the siren song of another bookstore was whispering sweet nothings in my ear.

You have to understand how much I hate myself when I succumb to the allure of yet another 33 percent discount coupon from Borders in my e-mail box. No matter how much I promise to simply look around a store, but not actually succumb to incessant book lust, another tome beckons me across the bookstore aisle, oh, so seductively.

When a good buddy announced he'd read and thoroughly enjoyed Karl Marlantes' 600-page novel about the Vietnam war, "Matterhorn," I gave it a shot but bogged down 100 pages in. He was right about how well-written it is, but I'm cursed with a set of wandering eyes.

Before I could help myself, I was clipping through James Tabor's "Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth" and Diane Ravitch's "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education."

Meanwhile, I got an e-mail from a buddy from church extolling the virtues of David Foster Wallace's 1,000-page-plus "Infinite Jest." He's 90 pages from the end and thinks he'll read Mr. Foster's entire oeuvre if the remaining pages are as good as the previous thousand or so. I can't imagine reading a book that long that wasn't written by a 19th century Russian.

A colleague was raving to me the other day about Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom," a novel I have zero interest in reading. "You'd love it," she insisted. How could I tell her that novels about white upper-middle-class angst bore me now?

I've read hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pages this summer, but I've only completed one book cover to cover, an excellent thriller by John Verdon called "Think of a Number." I read it in two or three sittings because I desperately needed closure. At the rate I'm going, I think my brain is officially broken.

Tony Norman's weekly video, the Last Word, is featured exclusively in the Insight section on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.