Your phone is a better distraction machine than a book. The idea that most people who read, or who read in the past, were reading for the noble pursuit of being more knowledgeable or cultured is a myth. Most people read because it was the best form of entertainment available. In the time before electronics, you had no tv, no radio. Your options for entertainment were books, the newspaper, or going to the pub to drink and listen to somebody plunk on a banjo. Or, yaknow, talk to people.

As soon as radio became a thing, lots of people started filling their time listening to music or serials or the news. Then tv came and drew more people away. Then the internet. Then the internet in your pocket. Then Tiktok. Every step in this process has been an improvement at tickling the parts of the human brain which desire novelty, drama, humor, and general stimulation. You are not especially “bad at reading” - while general literacy has gone up in the last 100 years, the quality of literacy among the literat has gone down.

Now, I think that reading books is good. Especially in this day and age, I think that being able to whip out a real, physical book and read it is a great way to expand your world, improve your attention span, and relax without distractions. But at the same time, I don’t think that you should jump right into reading the Great Books. If your metric is “I must be enthralled by 1984 or else I am bad at reading”, then you are not in for a good time. Often The Classics^TM are simply not that enjoyable to read. They were written in another time when people spoke in weird ways. They were written for an audience that had a different cultural context than you. And we keep lauding them not because they are the best books for the averge reader today, but because they broke new ground in their time (see: Seinfeld isnt funny).

And, to be frank, most of the people who these books were written for had much longer attention spans than modern people - hell, read Ovid in the original Latin - sentences will run on for three pages. I think 1984 is a good book that can be enjoyable to read for the modern reader. But you need to build up your capacity for book reading to enjoy it. Similar to how you need to build your running capacity up before you will really enjoy running with a friend in the park. So if you want to be a better reader, I suggest starting with things that are easier. Things that will be fun and easy to read. Things that were written not to be a “great book”, but simply to be a fun, rompy adventure, or a steamy romance, or a wish-fulfillment fantasy. Read harry potter or the hunger games or the girl with the dragon tattoo. Young adult fiction is great for this, because it tends to be written just for sake of being fun enough to get kids to read. Or you could also try reading some fun short stories - something to build the habit of just sitting down for 10 minutes and opening a book to read just for fun. Or you could read a book club, and have other people create a bit of social pressure to actually pick up the book and read it, with the reward that you get to discuss what you read with friends afterwards.