I have the same problem and I blame social media. I've given up and just reread the page I skimmed through while I was thinking of something else. Sometimes, I'll find the audiobook version and read along but I find myself drifting off anyway. You're right though, it'll probably only get better with practice, most efficiently if you (we) lock yourself in a room for weeks and just read without a phone or computer to distract you or enable you having a short attention span.

Fun fact though, when you read something silently, the muscles in your throat actually articulate the words that you're reading and produce sound that's imperceptible to your ears. But if someone put an amplifier against your throat you'd be able to hear the words that you're "reading silently". Andrew Huberman talks about it in one of his podcasts, I forgot which one.

I don't know what it was called or if this book was even real, but I read it when i was 8-9 years old and I'm assuming I just got it randomly from the kid's section, someone probably put it there by mistake. I remember an edgy looking female goth with white-out eyes on the cover, half her face was a skeleton. The book was just a bunch of short stories, but they were disturbing as hell. TW cause it's probably not a children's book and I probably shouldn't have read this as a child.

>!Graphic depictions of someone disemboweling themselves and playing with their guts as they die, a girl who was too caught up in trying to look pretty that she cut her own lips off, one story where someone attempted to suffocate themselves by peeing into a toilet bowl full of bleach--I'm pretty sure I learned that peeing in bleach releases a toxic gas in this book--and one story about a glowing cat and fireflies.!<

This book literally haunts me lmao. I want to find it again just to prove to myself that I didn't hallucinate it. If anyone knows the book, I would very much like to know. It's probably this book's fault I like horror now as an adult.

Another one was Among the Hidden by Margaret Peterson Haddix. There were laws against having more than two child per family and this family hid an extra kid under their house. Read the first book in middle school and couldn't stop reading the rest.