Having been recently diagnosed with adhd (also autism, if you must know) I finally have a better undedtanding of why I've always struggled to read non-fiction. I've sort of assumed it's because it bores me, and that this makes me a bad person. Now I think it's because the tendency of non-fiction to be so interesting keeps sending my brain off in different direction. Two consecutive sentences can contain at least two different things that are intersting in different ways, maning it can tale ten minutes to get past those sentences, and I'll still feel like I haven't actually absorbed them. Fiction is easier, because it's the story I'm interested in. Obviously the writing and the characters have to be good, or else I won't care about the story, but they're in service to the story, and that's what I want to follow.

John Berger's little book is, obviously, packed with interesting things to say about art - so my brain kept wandering off in odd directions and tangents - a lot of which I seem to have absorbed from other sources down the years, clearly it's a hugely influential book, but here they are all together, a foundation for looking at and thinking about art that culminates in an analysis of publicity and advertising that rings true still today, though I wonder if he wrote about the image and art and advertising in the digital age. Also, though he makes wry references to the subject, the relationship of artists to, y'know, money, which keeps them from starving.