The crazies...Covenant series, book six...
"He read Robinson Crusoe once, during his first stay here. The library wasn’t his first or even third choice but back then you only got an hour or two of television in the common room and it was always kept on something worthless that wouldn’t disrupt the locals while their drugs kicked in for the night. The library was tiny and most of the books had been scribbled in, chewed up, or used for one unmentionable dead or another. He grabbed that book because it was pushed back in the stacks and it seemed the least, used."
"The book was hard to read, especially for him. His mother tried to get him to keep at it when he was young but the old man wouldn’t have any of that sissy shit in the house, not around him or where he could see it. An early memory of a favorite book being yanked away and tossed into a bbq fire helped to lock in his mind that reading wasn’t good, and his learning disabilities only helped to cement that belief."
"Still, hours with absolutely nothing to do. He didn’t know many of the words and eventually resorted to also snagging a tiny pocket dictionary to use as he read along. The process was slow and frustrating, he would get a few lines, maybe a paragraph in and then another unknown word would be found and he would have to look it up, losing his place in the meantime which meant going back and reading the section all over again."
"Moreover, the guy telling the whole story, the rich asshole who wouldn’t shut up about himself and how everything made him feel, made it hard to relate to anything going on. Then he reached the island. The fear of the unknown, the isolation of being stranded with no one to talk to. He didn’t know anyone wrote that stuff down. He knew what that was like, he could understand how crazy you got being holed up."
"The rich asshole in the book wasn’t alone for long, and never really, he had animals around. Also, there was the part where he found a native to be his bitch boy. No doubt that old book was written by some white dude. He never got to finish that book because he was let out before he got around to it but he imagined a lot more of that time alone, that time abandoned, that time isolated for that character, it made his time easier to handle knowing that someone had lived it and come out the other side with all those pretty words to write about it."