BookDragon Blog

“Throughout my life I’ve looked to books for all sorts of reasons,” Will Schwalbe reveals, “to comfort me, to amuse me, to distract me, and to educate me.” Reading, discussing, and exalting books eased him and his late mother through the final months of her pancreatic cancer; their literary adorations became the mega-best-selling The End of Your Life Book Club.

Here, Schwalbe unabashedly supports books as agents of change: “I think we need to read and to be readers now more than ever.” Through more than two dozen unexpected, clever combinations of books with life lessons – slowing down in Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living (a recurring favorite), learning to trust in Paula Hawkins’s unreliable The Girl on the Train, appreciating napping in Haruki Murakami’s marathoning What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, finding friends in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, and admiring greatness in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon – Schwalbe shares his reading to help us live our best lives.

Narrator Jeff Harding, who was less-than-ideal for Book Club, returns here, still encumbered with inappropriate, unnecessary accents and cadences he affects as the various writers or characters Schwalbe cites. For the purist, choose the page. For the more patient patron, multiple media will surely be appreciated.

Review: “Media,” Library Journal, May 1, 2017

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2016