Short stories to read to a person with Alzheimers

September 14, 2023 7:13 PM

My friend has hardly any short term memory, but is intelligent and appreciates language. I'd like to get short story audiobooks that caretakers can play for her, and I'd like to get links to stories I can read to her when I visit.

I have a New Yorker subscription, so stories from their archive are available. I can get books from the library, but most have to come from another location, and I am impatient.

posted by theora55 to Health & Fitness (22 answers total)

Another resource to check is https://librivox.org/ , they have free public domain audiobooks and include lots of classic short stories.

It might help to know what type of stuff they have enjoyed reading or watching in the past.
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:49 PM on September 14, 2023

I listened to James Herriot books on tape all the time as a kid, they might fit the bill.
posted by leastlikelycowgirl at 7:49 PM on September 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Would non-fiction essays work? I am listening to the audiobook version of Maggie O'Farrell's I Am I Am I Am and while the whole book is, well, a whole, the individual chapters work very well on their own.

Youtube also has heaps of people who do audio versions of literature. Maybe on your next visit you can ask if your friend has any favorite classics that you can find audiobook versions for? This channel has read aloud all of the Sherlock Holmes stories. This is another channel that reads public domain stories, including A Christmas Carol.
posted by spamandkimchi at 8:40 PM on September 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

If your friend is well read, she might enjoy the audiobook of Danny Lavery's Texts from Jane Eyre, which are short little spoofs of literary characters texting each other. Each segment is super duper short, like only a few minutes.
posted by foxfirefey at 9:10 PM on September 14, 2023

Do you have the Libby app? Your library (if it participates) probably has a lot of ebooks with great short stories.
posted by hungrytiger at 9:10 PM on September 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Grace Paley. Decades ago the radio was on during a long drive, and when Linda Lavin began reading one of Paley's stories, I parked the car to listen properly.
At The New Yorker's fiction podcast, writers are invited monthly to read a short story published by the magazine. March 2022: Gish Jen reads Paley's Friends, from 1979. The New Yorker also has The Writer's Voice podcast -- "New Yorker fiction writers read their stories from the magazine."

Anne Tyler's short stories in The New Yorker

Read 19 Short Stories From Nobel Prize-Winning Writer Alice Munro Free (Open Culture)

Open Culture other short stories available, and free audio books including short story collections

LibriVox free audiobooks

Selected short stories read by actors, from Symphony Space, source of the Lavin reading in the first link.
posted by Iris Gambol at 9:19 PM on September 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

What you want, probably, is flash fiction. There seem to be multiple flash fiction podcasts, and searching for [flash fiction audio] gave some promising YouTube links.
posted by amtho at 9:26 PM on September 14, 2023

Response by poster: I'm not a fan of short stories, so I'm looking for specific very well-written stories or writers. My friend is in her 90s, an artist, mother, widow, grandmother, well-educated. She isn't able to remember authors she's enjoyed, but clearly enjoys the rhythm of good writing. I read her an article on my last visit and she enjoyed listening. Nonfiction might work. Local libraries use the execrable CloudReader, there are audiobooks available, few short stories.

I find a fair amount of American literary fiction somewhat depressing or having a certain ambiguity; she is already struggling with the loss of memory and all that goes along with that.
posted by theora55 at 9:56 PM on September 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

If she likes history, I read out loud the book Oregon Trail: A New American Journey by Rinker Buck. It is the story of Rinker's effort to travel the Oregon Trail just like the pioneers mixed with history of the actual pioneers. Each chapter stands alone pretty well. I found it engaging and my listener seemed to enjoy hearing about each day's adventures without having to particularly remember what was in the previous chapters.
posted by metahawk at 10:14 PM on September 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

Would poetry be a better fit? Maybe you'd enjoy reading that aloud more than stories.

If podcasts are acceptable, I'll recommend Levar Burton Reads, which is all short stories. I would say the stories selected tend to be life-affirming or amusing rather than depressing or ambiguous. There's quite a bit of speculative fiction and writing from authors of color. You might find a favorite author this way.

Ray Bradbury stories might have a tone you'd appreciate (there's a great one on Levar Burton Reads).
posted by Comet Bug at 11:43 PM on September 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

Agree, read her poetry. Visit a book store and buy an anthology of poetry that you think might align with her tastes. If she likes stories, then perhaps a narrative poetry anthology. Or, just start with what is here as a taster.
posted by einekleine at 12:47 AM on September 15, 2023

Best answer: I think you might look for short stories used in middle/high school. Here’s one collection (ignore the kids ones) where I recommend the O’Henry, Chopin, Hemingway, and De Maupassant in particular but I think there are some gems.

I recommend “Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town” by Stephen Leacock.

My dad is a lifetime O’Henry fan and after his aneurysm he had no short term memory so we read his favourites to him over and over, so there’s that.

If you do a search on “ fireside al maitland read cbc.ca” you’ll find a small collection of holiday-skewed short stories read by Al Maitland at the CBC - really one of the best readers (Gift of the Magi reminded me). They are incredibly soothing.
posted by warriorqueen at 3:36 AM on September 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Oops, collection link: https://americanliterature.com/50-great-feel-good-stories/
posted by warriorqueen at 3:38 AM on September 15, 2023

Best answer: If you’re open to nonfiction you could look up New Yorker pieces by Joseph Mitchell. I mean, there’s no shortage of great nonfiction writing in the NYer archive, but a lot of it is quite long, heavy, or both. Mitchell seems like the right balance of prose quality, length, and light but engaging subject matter (never mind that he probably made a lot of it up).
posted by staggernation at 4:35 AM on September 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think P.G. Wodehouse in general would be a great choice. The language is extremely amusing, and the stories have a kind of fractal cleverness that should make them really fun to sort of surf along with. I would strongly NOT recommend the librevox recordings on archive.org though, because they have dudes doing accents. Maybe there's something on audible or that you can get through your library that's better (after more focused googling: YES THIS WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY RULE).
posted by implied_otter at 5:42 AM on September 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Well-written but not depressing is a hard one. Wondering about PG Wodehouse short stories. I've not tried reading them aloud, but they have a specific rhythm which might work.

Or maybe Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes - I don't know how far back the New Yorker archive goes, but these were originally published there.

In non-fiction, what about diary entries? You could try an anthology like this one, or follow one person through their diaries (eg Virginia Woolf). I realise your friend wouldn't remember that she had previously heard an earlier entry from the same person's life, but it might make it more interesting for you.

Hope you update us - would be interested in what works. My father has Alzheimer's and good language is important to him; I think he'd struggle with an author he wasn't familiar with, unless it tied into something he already knew a bit about, an industry he'd worked with or the like, and I wonder if that might be a way into finding a text, something that links with places your friend has lived or where she worked, if you are able to tell us more. I see that she was an artist but can't immediately come up with something related.

And what a thoughtful thing to do for your friend.

On preview - implied_otter has more helpful Wodehouse information.
posted by paduasoy at 6:02 AM on September 15, 2023

If gentle farce-like stories would hit the spot, James Thurber wrote many.
posted by humbug at 7:30 AM on September 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

+1 for Grace Paley's short stories.

Lydia Davis for flash fiction.

Also, with the caveat that Alzheimers symptoms can vary from person to person, my grandmother had it, and while her memory of say, the previous decade was pretty minimal, she occasionally would surprise my mom with a crystal clear memory of her deeper past. So you might experiment with with historical fiction, particularly from whenever your friend was in her 20s/30s.
posted by coffeecat at 8:11 AM on September 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

If she enjoys well written work being read to her maybe hook her up with a way to very easily play audiobooks so she can enjoy it all the time! I wish something like this could work for my dad but alas he is too far gone. [oof just reread and saw you are already onto this].

I suspect story length isn't even important if short term memory is shot. You could read to her whatever you want to read as long as it has an immediate short term impact she enjoys. The vibes likely matter more than the details.
posted by srboisvert at 1:08 PM on September 15, 2023

Best answer: Alzheimer's Dementia (AD) sucks, and you are a good person for trying to help.

As a pedantic note, people with AD often have just fine short term memory (STM) - it's because of this that they can often seem OK when first conversing with them.

What they lack is the ability to transfer short-term memories into long-term-memory (LTM), and so you will often find a person with AD repeating themselves in conversation after a few seconds or minutes.

People with AD also tend to have temporally graded retrograde amnesia, which means their LTM for events from their childhood can be as good as ever. But their LTM for events from about 30 seconds to several years ago are severely impacted.

To relate this back to your ask: books the person has previously read in their childhood or early adulthood would be ideal, since they may still have some of the info in their preserved LTM and can therefore track and enjoy the story more.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 4:12 PM on September 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: There's a significant distance between Not depressing and Feelgood. Spoofs and farce are no longer in her comprehension. I tried some, and she is no longer able to grasp them. I'm not up for reading poetry, for reasons. I read a story by an Israeli writer, a bit of magical realism, and she was confused by it. I'll keep trying; just being present has been a help.

Marked as favorite the answers that were specific.
posted by theora55 at 2:51 PM on September 27, 2023

Thanks for updating us.
posted by paduasoy at 4:27 PM on October 9, 2023 [1 favorite]