The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe

(Knopf, $25)

“It was a book club with just two members,” said Tina Jordan in Entertainment Weekly. In 2007, Will Schwalbe and his mother, Mary Anne, decided that they would start a reading bucket list. The occasion was solemn: Mary Anne had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given six months to live, and talking books was, in part, a way to avoid talking about the illness. Mary Anne would live for two years, enduring numerous chemo sessions and debilitating bad days, an ordeal broken up by the trips she and her son made into new worlds. In Will’s “graceful, affecting” new memoir, we’re invited to listen as the two engage in “peppery debates” about life, death, and values, spurred on by books ranging from Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety to Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.

“I wish I had known Mary Anne Schwalbe,” said Dan Cryer in The Boston Globe. Thanks to her, this book is never too maudlin and “shines with the light of a great soul.” An educator, a university administrator, and a tireless activist who advocated for refugee women and helped establish a national library in Kabul, she emerges in her son’s portrait as a woman possessed of a “don’t-worry-about-me resilience” who “elevated kindness and gratitude to cardinal virtues.” Each stop on the personal Great Books course she undertakes with her son leads to deeper discussions: Gilead offers an occasion to speak about God; Russell Banks’s Continental Drift a chance to talk fate.

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Not everything on the Schwalbes’ list is quite so high-minded, said Rachel Shteir in The New York Times. Discussions of thrillers like Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo become entertaining diversions. Will “can also be funny,” as when he notes how the decision to tackle a long work by Roberto Bolaño or David Halberstam seemed to mean that Mom would be sticking around for awhile. Though he paints a “golden aura” around his mother, “such sentimentality is forgivable, partly because he provides so many great lines about books.” The former editor-in-chief at Hyperion has written a memoir that’s about two losses—of his mother, but also of print books, which provided him and his mother such a tangible and familiar way to continue sharing life even as death closed in. “Reading isn’t the opposite of doing,” Will writes. “It’s the opposite of dying.”