"The End of Your Life Book Club"

February 4, 2013

"No matter how tired I am, I can always read," says Mary Anne Schwalbe to her son while waiting for an appointment with her oncologist in The End of Your Life Book Club. "But maybe that's because of raising three children while working full-time. I think I got used to being tired all the time. If I'd waited until I was well-rested to read. I never would have read anything."

"The Club" of two life-long readers--mother Mary Anne and son Will Schwalbe--meets in the waiting room at Memorial Sloan-Kettering's outpatient care centre. In the two years of life remaining to Mary Anne (after her persistent jaundice, weight loss and fatigue were finally diagnosed as symptoms of pancreatic cancer) she and her son, a professional editor and author, discover new writers and rediscover favourite stories, reading "promiscuously" books both great and small.

It would be enough if The End were a personal, and finely honed list of must-reads. It is this, but it is more. Schwalbe knows readers, their habits and idiosyncracies. After all, he's one of us. The serendipities and "stumbled upons" that happen in bookstores, the art of dodging from admitting we haven't read the book on everyone else's rave list, the books we read when we cannot sleep, the books we carry with us everywhere, the guilt and anxiety we feel for possibly suggesting the wrong book at the wrong time.

The End is a book of many meanings. As a mother's story, it can't help but contain great wisdom--the simple and profound kind that can only be accumulated by seven-plus decades of life, many of them as a wife, mother, advocate of education and champion of refugee causes. Even though she is well into her seventies and terminally ill, Mary Anne Schwalbe sustains these activities until near the end of her life. But it is only books and family that she is surrounded by at the very end.

"Reading isn't the opposite of doing," writes her son, who has only ever known is mother as a do-er of extraordinary proportions. "It is the opposite of dying."

Comments

Carrie Snyder said…

Sounds like a wonderful book! Thanks for the recommendation.

6:51 AM

Maycee Greene said…

I jotted down a lot of them while I was reading this. It was an interesting "take" on how to have a meaningful relationship with a loved one as they approach death.

Maycee Greene (Olympia Search Engine Optimization)

9:18 PM

"Indian Horse" by Richard Wagamese

“You go somewhere when you’re on the ice,” Virgil said to me after one practice. “It’s like watching you walk into a secret place that no one else knows how to get to.” Hockey is the saving grace of young Saul Indian Horse’s life. Lost to his family and orphaned in his grandmother’s arms, eight-year-old Saul is discovered at an icy railroad stop in northern Ontario and stolen away to spend the next six years at St. Jerome’s Indian Residential School. “St. Jerome’s took all the light from my world,” Saul remembers. He saw children die of abuse or suicide, with whatever they had to take themselves away from hell on earth: a pitchfork; rocks to weigh down a dress in water; rope to swing from the rafters of a barn. Anything, even death, was better than the despair of suffering the school’s daily humiliations. It is a hockey ice rink, built at St. Jerome’s during Saul’s second winter, that saves him. In the years that follow, the crack of light o...

Leave Your Mark: Land Your Dream Job. Kill It In Your Career. Rock Social Media. by Aliza Licht

In the digital age, could success be just a tweet or two away? Probably not. Take it from Aliza Licht, senior vice president of global communications at Donna Karan International, a clear career path, perseverance, and passion matter as much as they ever did. It’s just that how to make (or break) a career online (“killing it” works both ways) is now an essential part of understanding the wired world of work. Licht has plenty to draw upon in Leave Your Mark: Land Your Dream Job. Kill it in Your Career. Rock Social Media. It took a detour out of med school and into fashion, first as a magazine intern and eventually up to the executive suite, for Licht to find her own brand within a brand and build a following more than half-a-million strong. The author and creator of DKNY PR GIRL® knows from experience that no matter how sharp and snappy your tweets, it’s sustaining a start-up spirit that counts more. Going above and beyond (think spending your unpaid weekends sorting shoe inve...

"The Game of Life" by Rosalys Buckles Thorndike Wilson

“The game of life has been enjoyable and rewarding, and I have competed to the best of my ability.”—from The Game of Life by Rosalys Buckles Thorndyke Wilson A long life, as Rosalys “Rosie” Buckles Thorndike Wilson looks back upon it, is like a basketball game. It’s played in four quarters (a sport she learned growing up in rural Indiana, where all you needed was a was a hoop on a wall and a ball that had some bounce) with a little time-out in between. Rosie’s first quarter started out on a small, 20-acre farm near Etna, Indiana. Baths were taken once-a-week in a galvanized tub in front of the kitchen wood stove. There were the requisite chores including chasing down dinner (which, on a fried chicken night, involved catching and decapitating a hen before dipping it quickly in boiling water and then plucking off all its feathers). There was a pony named “Beauty”; “Fluffy” the long-haired cat; “Spot” the rat terrier; “Fuzzy” the baby raccoon and “Duke” a horse retired by the U.S...

Mimi Power and Magnifico: an author's blog

Search This Blog