Excerpt from The Country of the Blind by Andrew Leland, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I've experienced a form of this anxiety myself, as I confront the loss of my visual relationship with language. Once I can't rely on sight to write anymore, will I, like Borges, no longer be quite sure who is writing this page? When I first tried writing with a screen reader, turning off my monitor to see what it was like, I had a flash of this dissolution: I typed too fast for the screen reader to keep up, so I wrote into a void, the words audible in my mind, but without any confirmation that they were actually being recorded on the screen.

It was like writing in water, or calling out into the darkness. Even when I stopped, and the computer at last read the text back, my words sounded strange, echoed in an unfamiliar, mechanical voice.

But in between writing the first and second drafts of this book, my eyes have gotten weaker, and I now leave the screen reader on all the time. The anxiety of losing my own voice to the computer's has given way to a relief that I don't have to strain and stretch so much to see. I'm like a guy who could walk haltingly on his own if he had to, but it's so much easier to just use the crutches.

I find myself looking away from the screen more and more, resting my eyes as I listen back to a paragraph I've just written. If I suddenly lost all of my residual vision tomorrow, I know I'd be overwhelmed, and the grieving process I've begun would be painfully accelerated. But I also know I'd be able to finish my work.

I'm still getting used to certain quirks—my braille display doesn't always show me paragraph breaks, and when I'm speed-listening to a book, the reader burns through the ends of chapters and on to the next without stopping. I have to rewind, slow down, and artificially re create the resonant pause that the blank space on the page naturally offers a sighted reader.

But while I'm losing print, I'm not losing literature itself, which exceeds the eyes. The other day, with my phone's screen reader on, I was reading the newspaper at a pretty furious clip. I'd run across the obituary of Ben McFall, the legendary New York City bookseller who worked at the Strand for forty-three years.

The piece ended by describing McFall's deep commitment to his work, even after the pandemic and his failing health had forced him into the Strand's corporate office, away from the line of friends and fans who would wait next to his desk amid the stacks to get a personal recommendation, or just to talk books. The obituary ended,

Mr. McFall, who was so attached to his Strand name tag that he sometimes wore it around his apartment, chose to keep it on even though he no longer spoke to customers.

It read: "Benjamin. Ask me."

I had the speech turned up so fast that these last two paragraphs—which didn't even register as paragraphs, since the babbling screen reader ignored the line break—took only a few seconds to read. And yet I still felt tears burst out of my eyes at that final image, of McFall's commitment: not just to the pleasure of solitary reading, but to the community of readers who sustained him to the very end. My response felt like a sign that however awkward it might feel to read this way, I still felt the power of that community; I'm still a reader.

From The Country of the Blind by Andrew Leland. Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023, Andrew Leland. Except first appeared at Lithub.