The End of Your Life Book Club : Review
The book is about the conversations the author Will Schwalbe has with his mother while she underwent pancreatic cancer treatment.
Mary Anne, the author’s mother is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2007. For a span of two years she undergoes treatment at a cancer hospital in NY that included long hours of chemotherapy sessions. The author often used to accompany her mother for all her treatments. Most of the doctors give their verdict that the cancer has spread and the various treatments can only delay her eventual death.
During one of the long waits at the hospital, a simple question, “What are you reading?” takes the mother-son duo on to a wonderful journey of books for 2 years. The books they read are not are not serious kind books. They read all kinds of books, ranging from classics, teen adventures, poetry, love stories, tragedies, dark theme books and then they discuss the characters, the endings, the situations in the novels etc. So, the book club is essentially a 2 person book club where the mother and the son discuss about the books they have read. In the process the author discovers so many aspects of her mother that he never did earlier.
The very first novel they read is “Crossing from Safety” and the discussion is around whether one of the characters in the novel would be able to handle the situation after his loved one’s death. Clearly even though the discussion was about the characters in the book, they were indirectly addressing the aspect of how family members would be able to deal with the death of their mother, who throughout her life gave direction to everyone and was the hub of the family.
“Reading isn’t the opposite of doing; it’s the opposite of dying” is a theme that comes up in many of their discussions. One is not supposed to merely read a book and forget about it. One must constantly question, “What should I be doing to do about the themes mentioned in the book?”. May be you can be compassionate towards people that you encounter in your life, May be you can do just do your bit in addressing the situation, develop a better perspective towards life etc.
One of the reasons, the author gives, about choosing such a title,”The end of YOUR LIFE book club”, You don’t know what book would be your last book, what conversation will be your last conversation. So, it is more “seize the moment” kind of attitude that this book conveys.
Towards the end of the book, the author says this about his mom :
She never wavered in her conviction that books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal, that reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose—electronic (even though that wasn’t for her) or printed, or audio—is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in the human conversation. Mom taught me that you can make a difference in the world and that books really do matter: they’re how we know what we need to do in life, and how we tell others. 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.
It is pretty amazing that over a span of two years(2007-2009), despite starting a company and having a hectic schedule, the author manages to read about 100 odd books.It shows how much he loved her mother. Here is the entire list that are discussed in the book. So, just in case you happen to read any book from this list, you can always look up the relevant section in the book and see what the two member mother-son book club had to say about it and what they learnt in the process.
- Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
- Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio
- W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” from Collected Poems
- Russell Banks, Continental Drift
- Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, translated by Alison Anderson
- Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone
- Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
- Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, translated by Natasha Wimmer
- The Book of Common Prayer
- Geraldine Brooks, March; People of the Book
- The Buddha, The Diamond Cutter Sutra, translated by Gelong Thubten Tsultrim
- Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
- Sindy Cheung, “I Am Sorrow”
- Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking
- Karen Connelly, The Lizard Cage
- Pat Conroy, The Great Santini
- Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
- Patrick Dennis, Auntie Mame
- Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer; The Year of Magical Thinking
- T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
- Ian Fleming, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
- Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth
- Esther Forbes, Paul Revere and the World He Lived In; Johnny Tremain
- E. M. Forster, Howards End
- Anne Frank, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
- William Golding, Lord of the Flies
- Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
- David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter
- Susan Halpern, The Etiquette of Illness
- Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
- Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train; The Price of Salt; The Talented Mr. Ripley
- Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner; A Thousand Splendid Suns
- Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler
- John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
- Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories; Christopher and His Kind
- Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat
- Ben Johnson, Volpone
- Crockett Johnson, Harold and the Purple Crayon
- Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
- Jon Kabat- Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living; Wherever You Go, There You Are; Coming to Our Senses
- Mariatu Kamara, The Bite of the Mango, with Susan McClelland
- John F. Kennedy, Profi les in Courage
- Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies; The Namesake; Unaccustomed Earth
- Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies
- Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, translated by Reg Keeland
- Victor LaValle, Big Machine
- Munro Leaf, The Story of Ferdinand, illustrated by Robert Lawson
- C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia
- Alistair MacLean, The Guns of Navarone; Where Eagles Dare; Force 10 from Navarone; Puppet on a Chain
- Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley
- Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger; Death in Venice; The Magic Mountain;Mario and the Magician; Joseph and His Brothers,
- W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage; The Painted Veil;Collected Short Stories, including “The Verger”
- James McBride, The Color of Water
- Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach
- Herman Melville, Billy Budd
- Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
- Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance
- Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
- J. R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar
- Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
- Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness
- Nagarjuna, Seventy Verses on Emptiness, translated by Gareth Sparham
- Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française, translated by Sandra Smith
- Edith Nesbit, The Railway Children
- Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father
- John O’Hara, Appointment in Samarra
- Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Early, including “Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End?”
- Frances Osborne, The Bolter
- Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture, with Jeffrey Zaslow
- Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience
- Harold Pinter, The Caretaker
- Reynolds Price, Feasting the Heart
- Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons
- David Reuben, M.D., Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex: But Were Afraid to Ask
- David K. Reynolds, A Handbook for Constructive Living
- Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping; Gilead; Home
- Tim Russert, Big Russ and Me
- Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are; In the Night Kitchen
- Peter Shaffer; Equus; Five Finger Exercise
- William Shakespeare, King Lear; Othello
- George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan
- Bernie Siegel, M.D., Love, Medicine and Miracles
- Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency: The Miracle at Speedy Motors
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
- Natsume Soseki, Kokoro, translated by Edwin McCellan
- Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
- Edward Steichen, The Family of Man
- Lydia Stone, Pink Donkey Brown, illustrated by Mary E. Dwyer
- Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
- Josephine Tey, Brat Farrar
- Michael Thomas, Man Gone Down
- Mary Tileston, Daily Strength for Daily Needs
- Colm Tóibín, The Story of the Night; The Blackwater Lightship;The Master; Brooklyn
- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit; The Lord of the Rings
- William Trevor, Felicia’s Journey
- John Updike, Couples; My Father’s Tears
- Sheila Weller, Girls Like Us
- Elie Wiesel, Night
- Tennesse Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
- Geoffrey Wolff, The Duke of Deception
- Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny; Marjorie Morningstar; The Winds of War