Books for Living
Ratings5
Average rating3.6
"From the author of the best-selling and beloved The End of Your Life Book Club--a wonderfully engaging new book: both a celebration of reading in general and an impassioned recommendation of specific books that can help guide us through our daily lives. 'I've always believed that everything you need to know you can find in a book, ' writes Will Schwalbe in his introduction to this thought-provoking, heartfelt, and inspiring new book about books. In each chapter he makes clear the ways in which a particular book has helped to shape how he leads his own life and the ways in which it might help to shape ours. He talks about what brought him to each book--or vice versa; the people in his life he associates each book with; how each has led him to other books; how each is part of his understanding of himself in the world. And he relates each book to a question of our daily lives, for example: Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener speaks to quitting; 1984 to disconnecting from our electronics; James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room to the power of finding ourselves and connecting with one another; Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea to taking time to recharge; Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird to being sensitive to the surrounding world; The Little Prince to making friends; Paula Hawkins's The Girl on the Train to trusting. Here, too, are books by Dickens, Daphne du Maurier, Haruki Murakami, Edna Lewis, E.B. White, and Hanya Yanagihara, among many others. A treasure of a book for everyone who loves books, loves reading, and loves to hear the answer to the question: 'What are you reading?'"--
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Wavering between 3 and 4 stars... This “book about books” (a category for the Read Harder Challenge) was sometimes very good and sometimes felt thin. It did make me want to reread [b:Stuart Little 138959 Stuart Little E.B. White https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347367311s/138959.jpg 2884160] and [b:What I Talk About When I Talk About Running 2195464 What I Talk About When I Talk About Running Haruki Murakami https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1473397159s/2195464.jpg 2475030], and to add [b:Giovanni's Room 38462 Giovanni's Room James Baldwin https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1493320612s/38462.jpg 814207] to my list, so I'll go with the 4 stars.
I took Books for Living off my Amazon wish list just before Christmas when I saw it was coming to my public library. Then I was sad that it took so long to get to the library (it always does though, doesn't it?) Finally it arrived, and, with great anticipation, I started jumped in. I love to read about books and one of my favorite subgenres of books-about-books is books-about-favorite-books. I worried a bit when I saw in the introduction that the author Will Schwalbe had had a great conversation about his favorite books on a plane with a fellow passenger and that one of the books the two had in common was The Alchemist (a book that didn't wow me). Nevertheless, I read on. I was disappointed to find that, while I had a few favorite books in common (The Little Prince, Bird by Bird, The Odyssey), there were a lot of forgettable books (at least forgettable to me) on the list, including Gift from the Sea and Girl on the Train and Rebecca, and there was a lot more memoir talk than book talk. Nevertheless, I may take a closer look at some of the books on Schwalbe's list that I haven't read, such as Lateral Thinking and The Importance of Living and Song of Solomon and A Little Life. In addition, to some good book recommendations, I love this little quote from his book:
“Now that my brother, sister, and I are all over fifty, my brother, using a golf analogy, refers to our lives as being played on the back nine—the first nine holes are behind us. Whatever score we've accumulated, we carry with us. Suddenly, finishing honorably and staying out of sand traps and water hazards matters more than seeing our names on the leaderboard.”
