What Are You Reading?
During the recent February snow event that still has parts of Nevada County without power, I rediscovered a treasure on a bookshelf in my library. The book by author and book editor Will Schwalbe is a beautiful memoir, The End of Your Life Book Club, inspired by his mother’s remarkable life and the lifelong passion for books they shared. His mother, Mary Anne Schwalbe, was a tireless humanitarian who worked for refugees, traveling to many of the world’s most desperate war-torn countries.
In the darkest days of the Taliban in Afghanistan, she began working with Nancy Hatch Dupree who was living in Peshawar, Pakistan, across the border from Afghanistan, documenting and coordinating humanitarian aid to Afghan refugees. Hatch was devoted to saving Afghanistan’s devastated cultural heritage following the looting of the Kabul Museum, and was drumming up international support for books to remote Afghan villages. Will Schwalbe’s mother Mary Anne shared Mrs. Dupree’s passion for books and encouraged everyone she met to make a donation to the Afghan Library Foundation.
When Mrs. Schwalbe was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2007, she and Will formed a book club of two. Over the two years that she lived following her diagnosis, they read dozens of books, discussed them and talked about their lives during her chemotherapy sessions at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. In the book’s epilogue, Will wrote this about his remarkable mother—
“She never wavered 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…is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in the human conversation. Mom taught me that you can make a difference in the world and that books really do matter: they’re how we know what we need to do in life and how we tell others.”
When Will and his mother talked, she would ask him “What are you reading.” It is a question he now asks friends, audiences at book festivals, and anyone he meets. At the conclusion of his memoir, there is a fascinating Appendix—an alphabetical listing of the authors, books, plays, poems, and stories discussed or mentioned in The End of Your Life Book Club. Among those listed is Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader—a gem of a book that I discovered a month ago, just before being snowed in and housebound for a week in the Sierra Foothills above Nevada City.
When I next meet Will, he will ask me, “What are you reading.” My answer will be, “I’ve just reread your beautiful memoir, The End of Your Life Book Club, and Alan Bennett’s The Uncommoon Reader—a book about the British monarch…and literature, the ultimate democracy.
As Bennett’s uncommon reader noted, “You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.”
Readers, I highly recommend that you and your book club read them both.