I’m not proud of it, but it’s true: I read the bulk of Eliot Peper’s latest sci-fi thriller, Borderless, over multiple trips the bathroom. It probably deserved drawn-out sessions in a fireplace-adjacent armchair or at least an airplane ride with a cheap mixed drink at the ready, but hey. Given all of the demands on my time, both personal and professional, I found that there are ever-diminishing opportunities to sit down and read an honest-to-goodness, dead-tree book.

Like most of you, I do a ton of reading—nearly all of it on a computer screen or, more likely, my iPhone. I’m reading news, Twitter, and a never-ending deluge of emails. I’ve nearly excised Facebook from my life and have long-ago deleted Instagram from my phone. For me, having the discipline to engage with a book is often a challenge.

Like nearly everyone in Peper’s universe, I, too, am sucked in to “the feed.” In his imagined near-future, practically everyone has a biologically integrated device that acts as essentially a smartphone integrated into their eyeball. The opacity can be dialed up or down, depending on how “lost” in your feed you want to get.