The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe – I read this book in Dallas. That’s work with my A to Z theme, right?
First of all, if you haven’t heard of the Progressive Book Club, check out what a our book club host ML Swift created.
I really loved this book. It was simple, sad, hopeful and beautiful. I got so much out of it.
Life Lessons
“As in many book clubs, our conversations bounced around between the character’s lives and our own.” “Still, one thing I learned from Mom is this: Reading isn’t the opposite of doing: it’s the opposite of dying.” “It’s much easier to follow your bliss when you have enough money to pay the rent.” “They help us talk. But they also give us something we all can talk about when we don’t want to talk about ourselves.”Writing Lessons
Have a great first line. Tell a story and involve the read in the lives of the character.To Read List for 2014
- On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
- Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara
- The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
- Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas
- Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk
- Couples by John Updike
- Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
- Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamont
- March by Geraldine Brooks
- Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey
- Continental Drift by Russell Banks
- The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
- Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
- Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
- The Bite of the Mango by Mariatu Kamara
- The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
- Big Machine by Victor LaValle
And, I saw myself in this book:
This is exactly how I feel about London: “I think it was the first place she really felt like an adult.”
This is exactly how I thought about the movie Auntie Mame: “It rekindled in her the fantasy of being Auntie Mame, the women who took her nephew on a glorious trip around the world and taught him that “life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.”
BTW, if you haven’t seen Auntie Mame, check it out (the Rosalind Russell version).
This is the exact reason why I need to get over my insecurities and start telling people I am a writer: “Never make assumptions about people. You never know who can and will want to help you until you ask.”
The book made me feel good about myself. Like the author, I to spend a significant portion of my life watching reality television and that is in no way disrespectful to my creativity: “Part of curating, collecting and appreciating was editing – mom never had much patience for junk or for crassness and less so now that she knew her time was limited. I, on the other hand, continue to waste a significant portion of my live watching reality television, learning about the lives of dubious celebrities and consuming cultural garbage with the feigned irony and faux populism that’s a hallmark of my generation and the ones that immediately follow.”
The book was about a mother dying of cancer, a son who tries to deal with it the best way he knows how and the time they spent together reading amazing books. And, if that’s all you got out of it, you missed the point. Great book.
Have you read it?
Sydney Aaliyah Michelle 