I remember how much my mother used to read. She loved John Grisham — if I needed a present for her, you could not go wrong with one of his books. I think the pleasure I take in books came from watching her.
She reads less now, and it happened so gradually that there is no moment to point to. No announcement, no decision, nothing that would have prompted a question from anyone.
It took me a long time to understand that nothing had changed about how much she wanted to read. What had changed was what reading asked of her eyes.
Perhaps you know the other side of it.
The book has been on the side table for three weeks. You sit down with it after dinner, in the good chair, under the lamp you bought specifically for this. Twenty minutes in, the line you are on slides into the line above it. You go back to the top of the paragraph and start again, and somewhere in the middle your eyes are still pointed at the page but nothing is arriving.
So you put it down. And the sentence you say to yourself, i…