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A review by bibleahteca
The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe
4.0
I really enjoyed reading this book. Although you might think a memoir about the author’s mother dying would be horribly depressing, I didn’t really find The End of Your Life Book Club to be too much of a downer. Of course it was very sad that Will’s mother was diagnosed with an incurable cancer, but I think the book focused more on the journey they took together through their reading and discussions than on the sadness of her impending death. I think this is kind of the point, that we are all going to die, but what matters in the end are the lessons we learned, the discussions we had, and the people we loved.
“Even though The Elegance of the Hedgehog leads to a death, the experience of reading the book is even more joyful than seeing a Romeo and Juliet where they both live. I asked Mom why she thought that was, and she pointed out that the joy is a product not of whether characters live or die, but of what they’ve realized and achieved, or how they are remembered.”
I definitely recommend this book. It appealed to me on many levels: my love of memoirs, my interest in travel and foreign countries (many of the books they read were about life in war-torn countries or written by refugees), and, of course, my love of books. There are great passages about why reading is important, the love of books as physical objects, and the different types of serendipities in bookstores. As an avid reader, I loved quotes such as, “Reading isn’t the opposite of doing; it’s the opposite of dying.” I also really enjoyed reading their discussions of specific books, and I kept a post-it note in the back of my book to keep track of which ones I wanted to add to my TBR list. (Many, many books were added to that list with this reading.)
I found The End of Your Life Book Club to be a really enjoyable read about a man’s relationship with his mother, the beauty and importance of literature, and the value of discussing the important things with the ones you love.
More book reviews at Books Speak Volumes.
“Even though The Elegance of the Hedgehog leads to a death, the experience of reading the book is even more joyful than seeing a Romeo and Juliet where they both live. I asked Mom why she thought that was, and she pointed out that the joy is a product not of whether characters live or die, but of what they’ve realized and achieved, or how they are remembered.”
I definitely recommend this book. It appealed to me on many levels: my love of memoirs, my interest in travel and foreign countries (many of the books they read were about life in war-torn countries or written by refugees), and, of course, my love of books. There are great passages about why reading is important, the love of books as physical objects, and the different types of serendipities in bookstores. As an avid reader, I loved quotes such as, “Reading isn’t the opposite of doing; it’s the opposite of dying.” I also really enjoyed reading their discussions of specific books, and I kept a post-it note in the back of my book to keep track of which ones I wanted to add to my TBR list. (Many, many books were added to that list with this reading.)
I found The End of Your Life Book Club to be a really enjoyable read about a man’s relationship with his mother, the beauty and importance of literature, and the value of discussing the important things with the ones you love.
More book reviews at Books Speak Volumes.