Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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) novels depressing. 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.

As the young people say, that's a skill issue. No one is making anyone read a depressing book.

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.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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) novels depressing. 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.

As the young people say, that's a skill issue. No one is making anyone read a depressing book.

Anonymous wrote:I am in 3 book clubs. Two are mostly women over 50/60, and we read a ton of fiction - both for the club and on the side. So anecdotally, these doesn’t seem right for women.

Now for men, it would seem right.

Anonymous wrote: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) novels depressing. 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.

Anonymous wrote: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) novels depressing. 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.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Haven't seen a lot of data on this, but it seems people rarely read fiction after a certain age. Anecdotally this seems to be true. Heck, even Cormac McCarthy and Philip Roth, two of America's greatest novelists, admitted in their later years that they had stopped reading fiction. Why is this the case?

I don't know, but at least anecdotally this is the case for me, and I got an MFA in fiction writing at 40. I'm now 53 and read and write mostly nonfiction.