Fiction

I do find fiction more difficult to read; it is easier to listen to, as the story can ramble off subject and I can feel resentful when I have read three pages, using my precious energy for no apparent reason!!!
A good way around this landed on my lap by a simple visit to the local charity shop. Reader's Digest publishes multiple books in one. Each one abridged by 100-200 pages, so the story is more concise and the flowery bits are missed out! Put "Of Love and Life, Reader's Digest" in Amazon search and you will find multiple books each of three abridged novels. I have been lucky enough to find them second hand in charity shops, and my Mum and husband look out for them but they are all used from £0.01 with P&P, so certainly worth a try. I don't always read the whole collection just one or two from the three, but it makes it so much easier for my memory. I hope to be able to come back to those once I have read through some of my non-fiction ones.
Another good read with short pieces and easier to follow, is The Time Traveller's Wife. It has become an award winner and you may know of the film, but as the chapters were sometimes short and the scenario of time-travel repeats itself over and over throughout the book, the concept is easy to grasp and therefore easy to read!
Books of letters is another great option. 84 Charing Cross Road tells of the friendship built up between a writer in New York and the manager of a secondhand bookshop in London. The letters are touching, humorous, tearjerking and follow their lives from the late 1930s, through to the 1960s. In the same vein is The Diary of Anne Frank (though maybe more of a tear-jerker) and The Guernsey Potato Peel Pie Society.(these aren't strictly fiction but are certainly not studious self-help books) Also remember Bridget Jones' Diary!
I have been able to listen to a more varied library. OH reads me autobiographies, most recently Stephen Fry's. We've tried reading more complicated tales and larger classics. But if I don't know the story already or it gets too fiddly with detail we have to give up as I just can't follow them. Oliver Twist was one that worked and Watership Down by Richard Adams.
The Sci-Fi category includes Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy and Stephen King's release from last year about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, 11-22-63. One of King's easier to follow plots, according to my husband who is a big fan.
Children's books are so important. I have recently read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for the first time and listened to Winnie The Pooh. Reading series of them helps with choosing the next book! The Narnia collection has come back again and again as my husband and I both enjoy them and he has also read me Anne Of Green Gables, Avonlea, The Island, and beyond.
Every Christmas encourages a shared seasonal read in December; One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Starlight Barking; Box Of Delights; A Christmas Carol; and the Harry Potter books always mention Christmas, so why not!?
Well that should be enough to keep you going!!!