Worth Reading

From an article in the LAT today, title Shades of Gray in Fiction, by Maria La Ganga:

“Since America’s 78 million baby boomers started turning 60 last year, dozens of novels with graying protagonists and late-life themes have hit the nation’s bookstores, adding a few new wrinkles to the face of contemporary fiction and underscoring a sobering fact about readers in America: The most avid book-lovers are 50 and older.

“Increasingly, so are the characters they’re reading about. And ‘the novelists are getting older’ too, said Jane Friedman, president and CEO of HarperCollins Worldwide. ‘It’s really the graying of America. … This is not a trend. I think it’s the zeitgeist.’”

As writer, reviewer and professor Alan Cheuse says, “it’s the geriatric equivalent of the coming-of-age novel.”

Some examples from the article:

• prostate cancer, impotence and lust in Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost
• menopause and widowhood in Alan Cheuse’s The Fires
• retirement in Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother
• aging parents in Anne Tyler’s Digging to America
• illness and hospital visits in Armistead Maupin’s Michael Tolliver Lives
• parent caregiving and … stopping caregiving … in Alice Sebold’s The Almost Moon
• assisted living and elderly sex in Tim Sandlin’s Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty
• “graphic, post-heart attack coupling” in Larry McMurtry’s When the Light Goes
• rapidly failing health and end-of-life travel in The End of the Alphabet by C.S. Richardson
• prostate cancer and thoughts of suicide in Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land (last book in his trilogy that started with The Sportswriter)

More large print editions coming our way!