By Kate Havelin
The End of Your Life Book Club (Knopf, 2012) turns out to be the right kind of reading for this uncertain era. I’m not a pessimist and don’t expect the virus to end my life anytime soon, although I know it’s possible. It’s more that Will Schwalbe’s 2012 New York Times’ best-seller about reading with his mother, who had terminal pancreatic cancer, offers readers a lifetime of books worthy for their “to-read” stack.
Schwalbe recounts how he and his mother, Mary Anne, would sip mochas and talk through their latest read as they waited in Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s outpatient care center. The waiting room scenes complete with hospital hot drinks seem quaint and innocent, a world away from our daily news images of frenetic emergency rooms overflowing into makeshift triage tents and rows of refrigerated trucks full of bodies of patients dead of Covoid-19.
Each chapter names a book the author and his mom read, and within those chapters Schwalbe weaves his mother’s groundbreaking career ranging from a Harvard admissions director to founding director of several refugee organizations, whose final project was establishing libraries in Afghanistan as she continued her chemo treatments.
This book is like a music sampler, offering enticing cuts of new and unfamiliar work. Thanks to the Schwables, my book list now includes some older works I had shrugged past. Their bookish talks often included quotes that stay with me. Perhaps my favorite quote comes from a letter Mary Anne leaves in a book for her son:
We all owe everyone for everything that happens in our lives. But it’s not like owing a debt to one person–it’s really that we owe everyone for everything. Our whole lives can change in an instant–so each person who keeps that from happening, no matter how small a role they play, is also responsible for all of it Just by giving friendship and love, you keep the people around you from giving up–and each expression of friendship or love may be the one that makes all the difference.
In this time of fear and isolation, finding one book that offers quiet moments of peace and alsomleads to other good reads is as essential as shelter from a storm. And really, maybe every book is a place of shelter.
Find Your Book!
Need to get your hands on a good book while doing your work to shelter in place? The library is closed in a response of solidarity amid the COVID-19 crisis, but here are some places where you can get your hands on all the great titles. Shop independent bookstores!
SubText Books: https://subtextbooks.com/books
Moon Palace Books: https://www.moonpalacebooks.com/
The Red Balloon Bookshop: https://www.redballoonbookshop.com/
Birchbark Books: https://birchbarkbooks.com
Magers & Quinn: https://www.magersandquinn.com/
Next Chapter Booksellers: https://www.nextchapterbooksellers.com/
Irreverent Bookworm: https://irrevbooks.com/
Or you could even consider the amazing Powell’s in Portland: https://www.powells.com/; Book Shop, https://bookshop.org/; AbeBooks https://www.abebooks.com/; or Indie Bound, https://www.indiebound.org/