The first book I read after brain surgery was Love on the Brain by Ali Hazelwood. You don’t know me well enough to understand how incongruous that is. I read cyberpunk, travelogues, dark mystery novels, and math journals. Not romance novels with a science bent.
But here’s the thing. Hazelwood writes clearly. There are only a few characters to keep track of and they are easy to understand. It was a gift to enjoy a book that was simply fun. You sort of know what’s going to happen. The author is taking you along for a ride and you know the destination but not how to get there. And everything works out in the end. Now that’s messaging I can get into.
Sadly, the physical act of reading wasn’t easy at all. I used an electronic book so that I could keep changing the font size and typeface. Mostly I read with black letters on a cream background but sometimes I reversed it to white letters on a dark gray page.
And I often had to reread whole paragraphs because I would confuse the end of one line with the beginning of some other line. Patiently, I reassembled these disparate lines in my head until I could follow the text correctly. Sometimes it took forever and my head hurt. But I kept at it. Basically, I re-learned reading with Ali Hazelwood and for that I am eternally grateful.
Postscript. Still can’t read math journals. But neuro-damage can take years to heal if it heals at all. If it ends up being romance novels for life, I’ll take it.
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