The End of Your Life Book Club

I'd like to recommend a book. 'The End of Your Life Book Club' by Will Schwalbe. This book has many things going for it. 

  1. It's about the pleasures and rewards of reading and a reader's life.
  2. It's about how reading can sustain us in times of turmoil.
  3. It's in the same vain as 'When Breath Becomes Air', 'Being Mortal', 'Brain on Fire' and 'Stir'
  4. It's a story of a son's relationship with his mother. Positive as I wish mine was.
  5. It chronicles many books as they read together from 'Crossing to Safety' by Wallace Stegner to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s 'Full Catastrophe Living' to 'The Price of Salt' by Patricia Highsmith and about 40 more.
  6. They point out the nuggets in the fiction that help build mental models of the world. In a way I hadn't considered in the past. Hard to explain. Rather than explicitly saying an action is a bias, these stories put people with biases into action and tells the outcome rather they overcome and discover or fall into the pits. This takes more work to see the lessons.
  7. Their love of the reading is infectious.  
  8. A well told story ultimately about the courage to face life.
  9. It choked me up and brought tears to my eyes as a only a good story can.