I've spent a lot of time wondering why so many people don't read.
The usual explanation is that people are too busy - Maybe.
Others say phones and social media have destroyed our attention spans - Maybe that too.
But I suspect there is another possibility.
What if many books simply aren't written for non-readers?
I walk into bookshops and see shelves filled with books that seem determined to turn a simple observation into a five-page event.
The tree wasn't just a tree - it was elaborately described.
Most people are thinking: "It's a tree."
Again, there is nothing wrong with that style of writing. Many readers love it.
I simply realised it wasn't the book I wanted to write.
When I wrote No, I Won't Buy You a Drink!, I made a deliberate decision not to package the world around me.
I travelled through Australia, Europe, the United Kingdom, North America, and the Bahamas. I crossed the Atlantic Ocean. I spent time in hospitals, hostels, detention centres, rugby clubs, and border crossings.
But I wasn't interested in describing the Eiffel Tower for someone who couldn't see it.
There are already thousands of books that can do that.
I wasn't interested in writing a literary masterpiece about landmarks.
I was interested in people.
The conversations.
The awkward moments.
The misunderstandings.
The observations.
The lessons hiding in plain sight.
I wanted readers to stay on the path with me instead of being distracted by scenery designed to make the writing appear more literary than the experience itself.
Because the truth is, I didn't write this book primarily for people who already read fifty books a year.
I wrote it for the millions of people who don't.
The mother or father who says they never have time to read.
The husband who hasn't finished a book since school.
The person who spends two hours scrolling every night but insists they're too busy for a chapter.
The person trying to get back into reading.
The reluctant reader.
The non-reader.
And perhaps just as importantly, I wrote it for the people buying gifts for them.
Every Father's Day, Christmas, and birthday, people search for gifts for men, books for dads, books for men who don't read, travel memoirs for men, easy-to-read books, and books someone will actually finish.
The problem is that many of those books are still written for people who already love reading.
I wanted to write a book for someone who normally walks straight past the book section.
A Father's Day gift that gets read.
A Christmas gift that gets opened and finished.
A birthday present that starts conversations instead of collecting dust beside the barbecue accessories and novelty socks.
That doesn't mean the ideas are simple - It means the writing is.
There's a difference.
This is a travel memoir that uses hearing loss, illness, and adversity to explore authenticity, attention, and human connection.
The irony is that the people who review books most often are usually passionate readers.
They're often comparing books against literary standards, writing styles, and storytelling traditions developed by people who love books.
That's perfectly reasonable.
But it can sometimes mean they judge a book by what it chooses not to do.
No, I Won't Buy You a Drink! deliberately avoids much of the packaging that many books embrace.
The purpose was never to impress readers with descriptions.
The purpose was to get readers to the ideas.
To the observations - To the conversations - To the lessons.
To the question that sat quietly behind the entire journey:
What happens when we stop performing and start paying attention?
Perhaps non-readers aren't broken.
Perhaps they're not too busy.
Perhaps they've simply been handed books written for somebody else.
If that's true, maybe the solution isn't teaching people to read differently.
Maybe it's occasionally writing differently.