CAN YOU READ ME NOW?
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, while I was doing final sweeps through a book I’d just written, I began to notice that my eyes were having a hard time speeding through the manuscript. That didn’t really bother me, because the protagonist, a big-wave surfer named Greg Long, had such bad eyesight that he had trouble spotting giant waves on the horizon, and my situation wasn’t anywhere near that. Still, this was problematic. I’d always been a speedy reader who didn’t sweat small fonts, and I’d never needed glasses for navigating tricky terrain while mountain biking or skateboarding. Yet one night, there I was, barely into my 50s, highlighting typos with a pair of 1.5x readers draped across my nose. I wondered, is this my future?
What was happening to me – and
