Amanda,

By the time my mother in law was diagnosable with the illness, she already
could not follow even the simplest of plots.   She would try and read her
Estonian newspaper over and over, and she'd just give up and put it to the
side.

If she was able to read something, she was not able to retain it, even very
important things that she would've found notable before she got sick.

My suggestion is that your mom might like short stories, or books with
beautiful pictures, such as "coffee table books" that she can enjoy for the
photography.

Even TV shows with a plot were too taxing for her and she never knew what
was going on.   But she did enjoy animal planet, and slapstick comedy like
the three stooges, because of her great love of animals and the fact there
was seldom a heavy plot line to comedy shows.

Our LO was also a reader. After her dementia became evident we would notice
that she would read the same book over and over and never be able to finish
any book. We dealt with this in two ways. We'd go to the used book store and
buy ten or so books that we thought she might like from the 25 cent rack and
then give them all to her. One or two would pique her interest for a while.
We would replace these with new books every 4-6 months.

We knew she liked to read magazines. She was no longer able to read heavier
reading like Newsweek or Time despite being a long time subscriber. We found
out she best liked magazines with lots of pictures about home design or
travel. She enjoyed reading clothes catalogs as much as anything because she
could write in the catalogs. Also seemed to like to read Reader's Digest
quite a bit but she never ever mentioned anything at all that she might have
read in any of these magazines - other than to show my wife a blouse or
purse or shoes she either liked or didn't like.  Amazon.com sells magazine
subscriptions at very inexpensive rates so we would just subscribe her to
4-5 magazines and then keep on subscribing to the magazines that we noticed
she would look at more than once.  AW