From the Bookshelf of Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge…

The End of Your Life Book Club

Will Schwalbe

Discussion: 2017 Read Harder Challenge

Find A Copy At

Libraries

Group Discussions About This Book

Showing 2 of 44 topics — 5,607 comments total

2017 Read Harder Challenge

This topic has been closed to new comments.

* Complete 2017 RHC Task List
By Book Riot · 1 post · 6015 views

last updated Dec 15, 2016 05:50AM

* 2017 Read Harder Challenge
By Book Riot · 1 post · 3503 views

last updated Dec 15, 2016 05:44AM

What Members Thought

Apr 26, 2013 Jeff Scott rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: about-reading, audiobooks, afghanistan

The End of Your Life Book Club has a rather daunting title. It conjures a certain image. This is the last book you will ever read, the last conversation you will ever have. It can be rather intimidating. While the book does deal with cancer, the book is more of a travelogue of literature. It reminded me a great deal of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair (in that memoir the author reads a book a day for an entire year to deal with her grief). Books can be the window to the soul. In discussing a book, y The End of Your Life Book Club has a rather daunting title. It conjures a certain image. This is the last book you will ever read, the last conversation you will ever have. It can be rather intimidating. While the book does deal with cancer, the book is more of a travelogue of literature. It reminded me a great deal of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair (in that memoir the author reads a book a day for an entire year to deal with her grief). Books can be the window to the soul. In discussing a book, you learn more about the person than you do about the book. It’s not that the book has made an imprint on you, but that you have left an imprint on the book. In this way, one can see a chance at immortality an underlying theme to Will Schwabe’s memoir.

Will Schwabe was a long time publisher and avid reader. One of the main connections with his mother was over books. They were always talking about what they were reading and recommending books to each other. When his mother is diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, they began their own book club. Whenever his mother has chemotherapy or a doctor’s appointment, they take time to discuss the same book. We are taken on this journey where, through books, we learn more about the author, his mother, and ourselves.

I really loved the book review aspect. There is a list in the back of the book and I will definitely add some to my to-read list. The author knows how to write-up a good book talker and the love of books and reading will draw in anyone with the same passion. It’s a love letter to books and their transformative power as well as how much they reveal about us. It’s particularly poignant when discussing the book with a loved one since you might talk about things that are not brought up in normal conversation.

Schwabe also accurately identifies how it feels to lose a loved one. It’s not about losing the past, you have those memories. It is about losing the future. It’s about how much the both of you will miss. The memoir is plainly written with the sole purpose of documenting the time with his mother. The memoir is unpretentious and endearing in this way. Even though there are times his approach in talking about his mother is a bit too Proustian for my taste, the sentiment though is pure.

Generally, the book is a book for book lovers. For readers that is often the greatest treat. The power of books to translate our lives for us and to make connections with others is the book’s strongest feat. I highly recommended for book clubs and people who love books about books.

Favorite parts:
“One of the many things I love about bound books is their sheer physicality. Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence. Sure, sometimes they’ll elude you by hiding in improbably places: in a box full of old picture frames, say, or in the laundry basket, wrapped in a sweatshirt. But at other times they’ll confront you, and you’ll literally stumble over some tomes you hadn’t thought about in weeks or years. I often seek electronic books, but they never come after me. They may make me feels, but I can’t feel them. They are all soul with no flesh, no texture, and no weight. They can get in your head but can’t whack you upside it.” P. 38

“I realized then that for all of us, part of the process of Mom’s dying was mourning not just her death but also the death of our dreams of things to come. You don’t really lose the person who has been; you have all those memories….I was learning that when you’re with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.” P. 104

“Yet I had a thought then that made me smile. I would remember the books that Mom loved, and when the children were old enough, I could give those books to them and tell them that these were books their grandmother loved. The littlest ones would never see the British Isles through her eyes, but they could see it through the eyes of the writers she admired…” p. 104

And then something occurred to me. “You know: the thing about our book club is that we’ve really been in it all of our lives.” Mom agreed by pointed out that she’d been doing the same with others too—talking about books with my sister and brother and some of her friends. “I guess we’re all in it together,” she said. And I couldn’t help but smile at the other meaning of the phrase. We’re all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one.” P. 224

“Mom also showed me, over the course of two years and dozens of books and hundreds of hours in hospitals, that books can be how we get closer to each other, and stay close, even in the case of a mother and son who were very close to each other to begin with, and even after one of them has died.” P. 256

...more

2 likes · Like · see review

Jun 08, 2024 Sara rated it really liked it

Shelves: physical-book, 2024

My mother really enjoyed this book, but I didn’t read until years later, after reading the author’s new book, “We Should not Be Friends”. His mother, Mary Anne Schwalbe, had a remarkable life and the career of someone who was almost like a fictional character. A career in the theater, education, higher education as well as traveling all over the world on various volunteer missions, and managing her family’s various comings and goings. At times he seems more focused these achievements, than their ...more

1 like · Like · see review