Reading during illness — not catastrophic illness but the specific limbo of a bad fever or a slow convalescence — produces a particular quality of attention that I've been trying to name. The prose seems to matter more, not less, because you're stripped of the defenses that normally filter your engagement with it.

I read most of Middlemarch during a week when I was too sick to work but not sick enough to sleep. The experience was hallucinatory in the best sense. Eliot's prose, already requiring sustained attention, seemed to speak directly to something that the fever had cleared a path to. I'm not sure this is anything more than anecdote but I've heard similar things from other readers.

The books I've read during illness are the ones I remember most completely. The altered state of convalescence does something to the reading experience that I can't fully explain and don't entirely want to.