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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My dad was reading 10 books a week easily in his 70s.  In his 90s he doesn’t read many novels.  Reads news online, etc.  I think four factors:
1) mental slipping makes it harder to follow long involved plots.  Stuff like Grisham or short magazine articles much easier to follow.
2) eyes slipping.  Even at 50, it’s a pain to read novels that are heavy to hold and I need glasses.  Even with kindle it’s just a pain to magnify and have to keep moving the page down.  My grandmother basically lost all sight to read later in life and gave up reading even her trashy romance novels.
3) [b]novels depressing. [/b] When you’re 80 years old who wants to read a bunch of depressing stuff?  Seems like every novel I read has a suicide, rape, tragic death, etc.  even at 50, I need some better news.
4) harder to get to bookstore/library as you get older.  And not all seniors have a kindle or know how to work it. 
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As the young people say, that's a skill issue. No one is making anyone read a depressing book. [/quote]

But it’s incredibly hard to find novels that aren’t depressing!  I’ve asked on forum  before and didn’t get a lot of suggestions.  Outside of the Bridget jones type chick lit romances, most fiction is about depressing stuff.  Look at that other thread about the NYTimes lost — it’s almost all depressing.

It reminds me of when we took my grandmother to see On Golden Pond thinking she’d like the older actors, and she was like “why am I sitting here watching old people t contemplate their mortality .”  She really loved Police Academy.  When you’re 30, deep thoughts are great.  When you’re 80, you’re past contemplating the human condition and just want some light entertainment to distract you from the looming horizon of your life.  That’s a generalization but I think it’s at least part of the reason.  My parents, who were big readers, are now also at the stage where they feel like everything they read is basically a rehash of something they’ve read before.  The longer you live the more you find that things are repetitive.[/quote]

I legit can only think of one book I've read in the last few months that had a sad sending and it's the first of a duology, so I'm sure the end of the second book will be happy.

Maybe if all you read is lit fic, but my gosh, there are so many books out there. Broaden the horizons!

And for what it's worth, all romance has a happily ever after. It's a requirement of the genre. Whether you want historical, fantasy, contemporary, etc, the books are going to have nice, settled endings. [/quote]

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