One summer morning in 2001, author Howard Engel woke up, went to his front door, and realized that he could not read the front page of The Globe and Mail. At first, Engel, known to lovers of detective fiction as the creator of the Benny Cooperman series, thought that friends were playing a prank on him and had simply changed the Globe page to a language he could not read; Serbo-Croatian or perhaps Korean were his best guesses.

But upon checking the rest of the day’s edition and consulting a doctor, Engel realized that something much more serious had happened: he’d suffered a stroke that had taken away his ability to read words. For a self-confessed, book-obsessed “print addict,” nothing could have been worse.

The Man Who Forgot How to Read is Engel’s chronicle of his struggle with a rare condition called alexia sine agraphia, which, bizarrely, left him unable to read while still able to write. After quickly laying out just how important reading had been throughout the 70 years of his life before the stroke, Engel goes on to describe the eerie day he discovered his affliction, his subsequent hospitalization and therapy, and his gradual, painstaking attempts to re-enter the world of text.

Happily, Engel’s ability to tell a story has not abated: he uses his novelistic gifts to spin a tale that is equal parts heart-wrenching, inspiring, and self-deprecatingly funny. Engel chronicles how he and those around him soon realized that his case was unique, and that his writer’s ability to communicate with words made him a fascinating subject for researchers eager to see how a person with an extra-high level of verbal skill would cope with this form of alexia. (One of those researchers was Oliver Sacks, with whom Engel struck up a correspondence, and who provides the book’s afterword.)

Engel’s memoir is an engaging read, told without self-pity or maudlin platitudes about how cruel life can sometimes be.