THE END OF LIFE BOOK CLUB by Will Schwalbe

Stand up and be counted Christensen readers!  It's a new year and I'm going to do my best to resurrect this blog, so I'm calling on all of you to re-commit and make an attempt at posting more regularly.  I also think we should post on books that are outside the Christmas B&N trip.
So here I go. 

I'll start with "The End of Your Life Book Club," by Will Schwalbe.  This book was on one of the favorite reads tables at B&N and I was attracted to the advertised themes of mothers, sons, and reading; irresistible themes.  This is Will's homage to his mother, Mary Anne Schwalbe, as she fights pancreatic cancer, and the book club that evolves as the two of them look for interesting-and distracting-conversation during long the chemo treatments.  Life long readers and discussers, the book club is simply a formalized arrangement of conversations they've been having all their lives.  Mr. Schwalbe quite successfully weaves the story of his mother, a gentle, refined, but ahead of her time woman into the chapters and what emerges is a moving tribute not only to his mother, but to the power of books to bind families and friends together.         "[Mother] never wavered" he says, "in her conviction that books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal, that reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose--electronic or printed, or audio--is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in the human conversation....books really do matter: they're how we know what we need to do in life...books can be how we get closer to each other, and stay close."

And now you've just read the last page of the book whether you wanted to or not! But you all know that that's how I roll, and it turns out to be a quirky habit that Mary Anne Schwalbe and I share!

I do recommend this book, it's gentle, inspiring, and well written.

Pro's-

-Well written, largely avoids the sentimentality a book like this could devolve into.
-Provides a stellar list of "want to reads"
-Fun discussion of some of the books we've read
-Models excellent critical reading analysis

Con's-

-Intimidating reading-these guys are blue blood, east coast, wealthy Harvard/Radcliff educated folks with no idea that they live a silver spoon life
-Incites jealousy--they seem to have nothing to do but read 100's and 100's of pages a week while saving the world building libraries in Afghanistan