Why I Write...And read large print to do so!

A few years ago, required to read a dense-looking and lengthy book for some research I was doing, I stumbled onto a way to make the task less arduous: I bought the book in large print. My eyesight is unimpaired, but I knew that large print would have an exciting psychological benefit—suddenly what would have been a slow slog through fields of mud was transformed into a swish-pan arabesque on a Vespa. “Look how fast this is going!” I enthused to myself after I'd broken the 300-page barrier during my first sitting. “I definitely need to run out and buy all of Tolstoy.”

For me, a good read is almost as dependent on pacing as it is on content or voice or style. When I tell you that some of my favorite books are collections of previously published magazine pieces—Calvin Trillin's food trilogy comes to mind, as do David Sedaris's and Joan Didion's essays—then, yes, you might come to the conclusion that I am a faithful New Yorker subscriber, but you might also come to the even more telling conclusion that I am a reader who loves the episodic. I'm a reader who fairly radiates the phrase, “Move along, bub.” I'm a reader who is an author's very, very best friend for 6,000 words—at which point I am likely to pause, perhaps for a snack or a tiny bout of elective surgery.

When I write, I try to hold to the same standard: I want my readers perpetually to feel like the boat is leaving the dock. It's not that I have the attention span of an unfed kitten. In fact, another of my favorite writers is Anthony Trollope, whose novels tend to clock in at 600 pages or so. But brilliantly, Trollope's fiction is composed of chapters that are usually eight or nine pages long. You get a blast, and then you move on. Trollope's characters are fascinating, and his prose is jeweled, and his take on money is timeless—but equally as important to me, his pace is brisk. It's hard to put his books down; as with eating salted nuts or renting a season of a television show on DVD, you can't help snarfing up just one more chapter because the last one went down so easy.

Which brings us back to the elective use of large print. You, as a reader, are never going to be able to change chapter lengths; but large print is a way for you to create the illusion of speed. By exposing yourself to far fewer words on a page than you regularly would, you can make what you're reading seem more fleet—without resorting to Reader's Digest or box cutters. It's like Kindle, without the thumb stress.

Anyone who has ever gone to a bookstore to buy a book available in a few different editions and decided not to buy the one with the tiny, tiny type on onionskin will know whereof I speak. God is in the font size.

So throw yourself a bone. And when, ultimately, your eyesight goes, and you actually need to read large print? You'll be more ready than ever.