When I began to write, I stopped reading. I did read some material related to researching my essays, but that was it. I read about crows, deer, Virginia Woolf, artists and of course about writing.  I love novels, but every novel I picked up I promptly put down. I told a friend who recently retired from a long career in publishing about my difficulty and she said that she, too, found it easier to write than to read. She spoke to a local librarian and the librarian said that it was “reader’s block.” It is similar to writer’s block, but it involves an inability to stick with reading a…