When Lit Blew Into Bits

Saw this article on New York Magazine: When Lit Blew Into Bits. It's an essay on Junot Diaz's novel, "The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao", but it also says something about the evolution of how we read. An excerpt:

The technology that infinitely distracted us this decade, sometimes even to the point of death—the entertainment that tore us away from work and family and prevented us from immersing ourselves in complex meganovels from the noble old-timey decades of yore—was not a passive, cartridge-based viewing experience but largely a new form of reading: the massive archive of linked documents known as the World Wide Web. TV, in comparison, looks like a fairly simple adversary: Its flickering images lure readers away from books altogether. The Internet, on the other hand, invades literature on its home turf. It has created, in the last ten years, all kinds of new and potent rival genres of reading—the blog, the chat, the tweet, the comment thread—genres that seem not only to siphon our attention but to change the way our brains process text.

What new species of books, then, have proved themselves fit to survive in the attentional ecosystem of the aughts? What kind of novel, if any, can appeal to readers who read with 34 nested browser tabs open simultaneously on their frontal lobes? And, for that matter, what kind of novel gets written by novelists who spend increasing chunks of their own time reading words off screens?

I found myself drawn, this decade, in the gaps between blog reading, to a very particular kind of novel.

Further, here's a link to a list on the same site: Cultural Works We'll Be Talking About In Ten Years, and that list includes books, alongside TV shows, movies, art, comics, and music.