Reading with your Ears

My mom doesn’t see very well anymore. She’s always enjoyed reading and has tried some of the large print books from the library and the talking books to see if that helps. But she seems to also have trouble concentrating, putting together the story as she reads/listens. She says that she forgets what she’s read/heard and has to start over again. I can totally understand how this happens because I often take long breaks in my reading of particular books. When I return to them, I have to bang myself on the head to remember what exactly was going on the last time I read that book. The process is accelerated with my mom. Over Christmas, we all (including my mom) found the process kind of comical. She was listening to a book on tape called Scarlet Feather by Maeve Binchy, an author I know she really likes. But she would often lose her concentration and even fall asleep while she was listening. Because our house is small, when she listens to her tapes we usually end up listening too as regardless of what we’re doing, we can hear the audio. That means that we also get invested in or involved in the story. With the Maeve Binchy book though, we had to keep starting the tape over again because my mom couldn’t remember what she’d already listened to. With this particular book we ended up listening to the beginning of it three times. We’d get a little more into it but that was only because we let the tape run longer even if my mom had fallen asleep. So each time we listened to the beginning of the book, we’d get a little bit further along in the story but not much. It’s a really interesting, incremental way to read. I found by the third time, I just tuned out of the beginning of the story (which I’d already listened to twice) and perked up my ears only when the new part of the story began. Ultimately, we didn’t get very far with the story because after the third try, my mom suddenly said that she didn’t like the tape and that it wasn’t as good as the book had been. I was surprised because I hadn’t realized that she had already read the book. The tape is unabridged and literally just someone reading the book so it isn’t actually any different than the book so it must be something in the experience of reading to herself that brought her more pleasure. Or just the fact that she used to be able to concentrate and be independent in her reading. Recently, we tried another book on CD called The Horse Whisperer by Nicolas Evans. This is a book I know my mom hasn’t read. I’d seen the movie (not a great movie) but had never read the book (it’s a good story). As the story was much more engaging than the Maeve Binchy, we ended up listening to a lot more of it and I found that we kind of pushed my mom to continue on with it rather than repeat and replay parts she didn’t remember. But at one point, I had to do a basic plot summary for her and realized that she was getting almost nothing from listening to the story. We were the ones who were reading. I've recently wondered if this is the end of my mom’s reading life and I wonder more generally how a habitual reader learns to makes sense of things without reading.