This is sad - it makes me think of Giles being unable to read...
How to write when you can't read
Of all the ways to learn that your brain has suffered an "insult," as medical professionals like to call the effects of strokes, one of the oddest is to get up in the morning and discover your Toronto newspaper seemingly printed in a mix of Serbo-Croatian and Korean. When 70-year-old Howard Engel came back inside with his Globe and Mail that hot July day in 2001 and found he couldn't read his own books either, the bestselling mystery novelist headed for the hospital. Tests confirmed Engel's own assumption: stroke, left side, rear. His memory was shot -- still is, for that matter, especially for names -- and he had lost a quarter of his vision, on the upper right side. But the essence of the diagnosis was a rare and almost incomprehensible condition: alexia sine agraphia. The elegant combination of Greek and Latin words meant that while Engel could still write, he could no longer read.
It's an understatement to call this a body blow to a man who writes for a living. But worse than the professional injury, as Engel's graceful little memoir The Man Who Forgot How to Read (HarperCollins) makes clear, was the insult to his very identity. Howard Engel didn't just read to work; he virtually lived to read. The son of a woman who read voraciously everything from mysteries to Proust and a father who would spin tall tales about "darkest Africa" at a moment's notice, from childhood on Engel always had a book -- or two or three -- on the go. In conversation at a neighbourhood café patio, he calls himself "hard-wired for reading."
...
What had truly sparked Sacks's admiration was the fact -- the neuroscientist calls it "astonishing" -- that while struggling to bring his reading up to Grade 3 level, Engel had actually written an entire Cooperman novel. The author is more modest; he had simply followed the age-old advice, "Write what you know," and subjected his character to the same brain insult. (Not exactly the same: "Detectives don't have strokes," Engel says dryly, "someone bashed him on the head.") Cooperman undergoes the same therapies as Engel, intermingles with the same medical professionals and fellow patients, and, without ever leaving his ward, solves the mystery of who put him in the hospital and why. Benny has since appeared in another novel, flourishing as perhaps the only brain-damaged detective going. "Benny's no more recovered than I am," says Engel. "He can still give you four reasons for the Persian Wars, but he'll have forgotten who he's talking to."