If you have an ADHD mind, you know the particular grief of a book you genuinely wanted to read and did not finish. It is not for lack of interest — the interest was the easy part. It is that somewhere around hour six, the book quietly asked for a kind of sustained, linear attention that you cannot always summon on command, and the bookmark stopped moving.
For a long time the advice was to fix the reader: more discipline, fewer distractions, a better system. Some of that helps. But a lot of it treats the mind as the thing that is broken, when often it is the format that is the poor fit. A four-hundred-page book is a single, enormous unit of attention. Of course it is hard to hold.
Build around the attention you have
The alternative is to change the unit. An idea does not have to arrive as a forty-hour commitment. It can arrive as a finishable piece — the load-bearing part of a book, delivered in the length of a walk, with a clear end you can actually reach. The same curiosity that could not survive the long version often thrives on the short one, because the short one ends before attention runs out.
The wanting was never the problem. The size of the ask was.
No streaks to break
There is one more thing an ADHD mind does not need, and that is another streak to break. Most learning apps are built on the threat of losing a number, which works right up until the day you miss — and then the guilt does more damage than the gap. We do not build streaks. A library you can step away from and return to without penalty is one you are far more likely to keep using.
None of this is a cure, and we would not insult you by pretending it is. It is a fit. Build the reading around the attention you actually have — finishable, without penalties, paced to your day — and a great deal of what felt like failure turns out to have been a formatting problem all along.