June 27: "Out of Africa," Book Club, "The End of Your Life Book Club, Will Schwalbe, Piece of My Mind

Anyway, I put on my new hat and sat down and started reading that book Out of Africa.  I'd read it already, but I wanted to read certain parts over again...

Holden loves rereading books and stories he loves.  He's constantly talking about writers and poets, and he talks about going back to visit them over and over.

I'm a lot like Holden.  I enjoy going back to literature that moves or excites me.  If it isn't evident, just check my posts for the last seven months.  They pretty much all start with passages from J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, a novel I have adored since middle school.  In middle school, I was all over the "sexy" stuff in it, as Holden would say.  As an adult and writer, myself, I appreciate the craft of the writing, the character development.  And the sexy stuff.  Some things never change.

My book club is coming to my house tonight.  I have the cheese spread and crackers ready to go, and the pop (or soda, for those readers from Wisconsin and Minnesota) is in the fridge.  We read The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe this month, and I loved it.  I finished it a little over an hour ago, and, like Holden Caulfield, I want to go back and read it again.

The book is a memoir about Will and his mother, Mary Ann Schwalbe, who is diagnosed at the outset with terminal pancreatic cancer.  As Mary Ann progresses through treatments and side effects and hospital stays, she and the author start reading books together and discussing them.  But it's not like a normal book club.  During the course of their discussions, they discover things about each other, and Mary Ann is able to pass along wisdom to her son from her seventy-plus years of life.

The aspect of this book I liked the most was the portrait of Mary Ann, who is a liberal, an educator, a human rights crusader, and a Christian.  By the time I was finished reading this memoir, I wanted her as a friend.  I wanted to be able to call her up and share a cup of coffee with her.  She reads constantly, and she is a person of action, volunteering in refugee camps and raising funds to build a library in Afghanistan.  She is an inspiration.

Will Schwalbe never allows The End of Your Life Book Club to lapse into easy sentimentality.  He knows Mary Ann would never have put up with that.  She doesn't want people feeling sorry for her.  As she observes, in more than one passage, she has had a lucky, charmed life.  No pity for this lady.

By talking about the books with his mother, Schwalbe is able to champion not only good literature (books his mom loved), but also good social causes (causes his mom fought for tirelessly).  When Mary Ann finally succumbs to her illness, I, as a reader, can feel the vacuum left behind--the grief for is palpable on the page.

I'm looking forward to talking about this book with my friends and family tonight.  I'm also looking forward to the pizza, but that's a whole other post.

And that's a piece of Saint Marty's mind.

Read this with a good friend