Listening to books

I've loved reading books since I was a little kid, and when I found out I had a degenerative eye disease, my biggest fear was losing the ability to read. I remember being taken on a trip to the Bay area by someone from the Dept. of Rehabilitation, just after I was diagnosed - we visited an institute for the blind. Adults with different levels of blindness lived there, learning how to cook, clean the house, pick out color co-ordinated clothes, tell different bills of money apart, use a cane, make chess boards (to sell), and to read braille. He wanted me to move in there, and my refusal was my first step on the road to serious denial :-)

I spent the next years trying to hide my vision problem from employers, trying to hang on to my driver's license, trying not to get squashed crossing the street, and most of all trying to read books while guessing at words that seemed always in smaller and smaller print. I eventually had to give up ... ok, I do still take my chances crossing the street without a cane, but I had to quit my job, quit driving, and have mostly given up reading books for pleasure.

This sounds sadder than it is :-) because computers have made reading online much easier for me than trying to read books, and now I've finanlly managed to loosen that death grip I have on doing things the "normal" way, and have tried an audio book. I'm listening to a CD from the library of The Lost World by Michael Crichton (sort of book II of Jurassic Park), and for the first time in a very long time, trying to see is not getting in the way of the story .... it's fun again. Hard to explain how great this is.