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3.81 AVERAGE
3.81 AVERAGE
In order to help time pass at his mom's chemo treatments, Will Schwalbe asked his mom such a normal question in their conversation, "What are you reading?" In the face of his mother's impending death, he turns to what he knows for comfort. His mother is an avid reader among other things and with their journey to the end of her life in many waiting rooms and hospital visits, he learns not only a lot about her but from her. This tribute to his mother is not just about her cancer and the books they read, but about the remarkable life she led all the way to the end of her life.
I loved this book because my favorite thing to talk about is books. Books improve my way of life. I feel at home in a good book. They start conversations and never end them. And my closest companions and I are always sharing books with each other. The other wonderful thing about this boom is how Schwalbe approaches grief and his mother and her amazing accomplished life. It's beautiful. I found myself crying in moments of grief over my own family losses. I also found myself tearing up over the thought of the relationship I have with my mother and mother-in-law. And I also thought about how nicely this ties in with Lean In and how many women have led successful, fulfilling careers and families generations before us. I guess I can't say enough. I loved it.
I loved this book because my favorite thing to talk about is books. Books improve my way of life. I feel at home in a good book. They start conversations and never end them. And my closest companions and I are always sharing books with each other. The other wonderful thing about this boom is how Schwalbe approaches grief and his mother and her amazing accomplished life. It's beautiful. I found myself crying in moments of grief over my own family losses. I also found myself tearing up over the thought of the relationship I have with my mother and mother-in-law. And I also thought about how nicely this ties in with Lean In and how many women have led successful, fulfilling careers and families generations before us. I guess I can't say enough. I loved it.
My advice on The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe...read this book now! For a book about a woman dying of pancreatic cancer it was so beautiful and inspiring. Mary Anne Schwalbe is my hero. The way her children look at her as adults is exactly the way I want my children to look at me. And, the relationship she had with her adult children is the kind I want with mine. She and I have a very similar outlook on life and this book gave me great comfort. It was a beautiful story about reading, being a mother and faith. And I loved every second of it, though I must admit to feeling I was committing a sacrilege reading it on my kindle.
These folks live in a world quite different from my own, filled with many privileges. Usually that distances me from any relationship with book "characters." I didn't feel that -- Mary Ann(e) had a remarkably generous and kind view of the world. There was a part of her that remained inaccessible and that was appealing too. She was stoic not to be stoic but rather to focus on what was of concern and interest to her. The son did a nice job of using the stories of their readings to augment his mother's story as he knew it and her story was indeed rich and deep. I also appreciated that you didn't have to know each book to grasp either it's relationship to the story or the feelings it invoked for these people. The writing was proficient but not elegant - it stayed out of the way in a sense, which is a good thing, but there was never a turn of a phrase that captured you. Overall, it was a good story that pulled me in, carried me along, and gave me some insights and things to think about, much like the books' roles in the story itself.
Unless you find a book about cancer depressing, I would recommend this book. I loved the male perspective of a parent's illness, and the way he and his mother spent their time together as she progressed through her treatment. I also spent a lot of time with my mother while she was receiving treatment for cancer, and this was a way to revisit my journey. I was deeply touched and identified with the quote, "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." So true.
I adore this book! Many pages are dogeared so I can go back to either reread a beautiful thought/quote from Will Schwalbe and/or his mother, Mary Anne, or find the title for one of the numerous books mentioned. It's a genuine story about life, family, illness, the paths we take and the choices we make. Every moment counts.
This is a superb book, and my starred rating is only a reflection of my personal attitude ("I liked it"), not a judgment on its quality. There are a lot of factors that keep me from matching my rating with my evaluation of its quality, number one being that it depicts an inevitable life journey that I am not prepared to begin thinking about yet (the shepherding of one's parent(s) out of this mortal coil, to be precise). Number two is that the worldview of the family is a far cry from my own. The books selected by the author and his mother to share and discuss through her treatments are by and large the province of a certain kind of East Coast intellectual tradition that I couldn't connect with as a suburban, middle class Midwesterner one generation removed from an agrarian heritage. One of Schwalbe's worldly mother's classmates at Harvard was John Updike, if that gives you a sense of where they're coming from, and many of the books and authors discussed here represent a stream of literary fiction from which I almost never drink. All that aside, this book is a fascinating memoir of a family of letters in transition and of shared literacy practices over a lifetime.
Basically I cried like three times while reading this quick and simple memoir, and I berated my sister for being dead inside for not shedding any tears.
If you like reading (and obviously you do) you will probably like this book because of all of the book and author references alone.
But his mom has cancer, so be prepared. She seems like she was one special women and it is touching that her son created such a great book based on their interactions in life, particularly near the end of her life.
If you like reading (and obviously you do) you will probably like this book because of all of the book and author references alone.
But his mom has cancer, so be prepared. She seems like she was one special women and it is touching that her son created such a great book based on their interactions in life, particularly near the end of her life.
I enjoyed this book. It had added some many more books to my nightstand. I think we it really did for me is longing for a desire to have a better relationship with my own Mother. I wish we had a gateway through books to discuss issues like Will and his Mom.
I fell in love with Will and him Mom. For the few books, we all read, I wish I could have been a part of their discussions.
I fell in love with Will and him Mom. For the few books, we all read, I wish I could have been a part of their discussions.
I read this book for the 2023 Buzzwords Challenge. The words for January 2023 was LIFE and DEATH.
This is the memoir of the life and death of one woman in New York City who was diagnosed with Pancreatic cancer in 2007 and who died in Sept 2009, 2 years later. In between the diagnosis and her passing, she and her publisher son (the author of this memoir) read and discussed quite a number of books.
I liked this book a lot. The only reason I did not love this book is because I am not very religious, and Mary Ann Schwalbe (the subject of this memoir) was a devout christian.
This memoir has rather a lot of similarities to my family and my life. Which is why it rates 4 stars. It would have been 5 stars had there been a lot less of the religion mentioned.
Will Schwalbe (the author) drifted away from the religion that he was raised with. I did the same. I left the church before I was 20 years old.
Mary Ann Schwalbe, the mother, was the total opposite of my mother. About the only thing they had in common was their devotion to their christian religion and their church.
Mary Ann loved reading books. My mother does not.
Mary Ann was actively involved with a number of charities, My mother is not.
Mary Ann went to college and was taught that she would have a career as well as a husband and children. Which is exactly what she did. My mother only went to nursing school, and promptly stopped working as a nurse as soon as she was married.
My father was diagnosed with bowel cancer around the time of his 60th birthday. He had surgery and an ostomy bag but was eventually unable to continue working, and was forced to retire at age 62. He was later also diagnosed with Prostate cancer (the slow kind)
He spent the next 17 years of his life, reading a ton of books, and walking a lot, and volunteering with the local Citizens Advice Bureau (the place where people could go to find out how to solve their problems).
From 2010 onwards, my family developed a regular Skype chat that would be sacrosanct and happened every week on Saturday mornings in New Zealand (where my parents live) and Friday afternoons in Canada, where I live. My family all lived for these chats. Dad and I would spend a few minutes of the chat discussing what books we were reading and thus were recommending to the other person.
In May of 2016, my father would often fall asleep during our chats. In early June he was moved to the Hospital for testing, but a week later he was moved to hospice care. He died at the end of June 2016 at the age of 79. He and my mother had been married for 57 years.
6 years later these chats are still a regular part of our lives. But now its just my mother, my sister and me.
In many ways this memoir gave me an insight into the last few years of my fathers life - even if he had a different kind of cancer.
This is the memoir of the life and death of one woman in New York City who was diagnosed with Pancreatic cancer in 2007 and who died in Sept 2009, 2 years later. In between the diagnosis and her passing, she and her publisher son (the author of this memoir) read and discussed quite a number of books.
I liked this book a lot. The only reason I did not love this book is because I am not very religious, and Mary Ann Schwalbe (the subject of this memoir) was a devout christian.
This memoir has rather a lot of similarities to my family and my life. Which is why it rates 4 stars. It would have been 5 stars had there been a lot less of the religion mentioned.
Will Schwalbe (the author) drifted away from the religion that he was raised with. I did the same. I left the church before I was 20 years old.
Mary Ann Schwalbe, the mother, was the total opposite of my mother. About the only thing they had in common was their devotion to their christian religion and their church.
Mary Ann loved reading books. My mother does not.
Mary Ann was actively involved with a number of charities, My mother is not.
Mary Ann went to college and was taught that she would have a career as well as a husband and children. Which is exactly what she did. My mother only went to nursing school, and promptly stopped working as a nurse as soon as she was married.
My father was diagnosed with bowel cancer around the time of his 60th birthday. He had surgery and an ostomy bag but was eventually unable to continue working, and was forced to retire at age 62. He was later also diagnosed with Prostate cancer (the slow kind)
He spent the next 17 years of his life, reading a ton of books, and walking a lot, and volunteering with the local Citizens Advice Bureau (the place where people could go to find out how to solve their problems).
From 2010 onwards, my family developed a regular Skype chat that would be sacrosanct and happened every week on Saturday mornings in New Zealand (where my parents live) and Friday afternoons in Canada, where I live. My family all lived for these chats. Dad and I would spend a few minutes of the chat discussing what books we were reading and thus were recommending to the other person.
In May of 2016, my father would often fall asleep during our chats. In early June he was moved to the Hospital for testing, but a week later he was moved to hospice care. He died at the end of June 2016 at the age of 79. He and my mother had been married for 57 years.
6 years later these chats are still a regular part of our lives. But now its just my mother, my sister and me.
In many ways this memoir gave me an insight into the last few years of my fathers life - even if he had a different kind of cancer.
This is a book about books and how the truly great reads can not only open your eyes to new or unknown worlds, but can also help us discover the beautiful and mysterious in our own world.
There were many books mentioned throughout the story - some I'd never heard of, some I wouldn't read and others I was so glad to be introduced to. But it was the story of the author's mother that was more inspiring than any of the books mentioned. What an amazing woman! So proactive. I loved her ideas on doing something, anything, rather than doing nothing just because the task seems too daunting. We can all do something, was her message, a message she lived right to the end of her life.
Will Schwalbe writes such a beautiful memoir of his mother and the precious time they got to spend together in the last two years of her life. There were so many avenues of inspiration for me in this book - A son who loved his mother, a family that shared a deep love and appreciation of books, a story of a modest woman who truly lived for others and had an admirable love for people.
It also made me want to read more books of substance, books with a message, books that can move me and motivate me, much like this one has.
There were many books mentioned throughout the story - some I'd never heard of, some I wouldn't read and others I was so glad to be introduced to. But it was the story of the author's mother that was more inspiring than any of the books mentioned. What an amazing woman! So proactive. I loved her ideas on doing something, anything, rather than doing nothing just because the task seems too daunting. We can all do something, was her message, a message she lived right to the end of her life.
Will Schwalbe writes such a beautiful memoir of his mother and the precious time they got to spend together in the last two years of her life. There were so many avenues of inspiration for me in this book - A son who loved his mother, a family that shared a deep love and appreciation of books, a story of a modest woman who truly lived for others and had an admirable love for people.
It also made me want to read more books of substance, books with a message, books that can move me and motivate me, much like this one has.