Tuesday Intros ~ The End Of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe

Every Tuesday Diane @ Bibliophile by the Sea hosts First Chapter, First Paragraph where we share the first paragraph or two of a book we are reading or thinking about reading soon.  Feel free to grab the image and participate.

My Tuesday Intro pick is The End Of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe. This is a true story about a son and his mother who start a "book club" which brings them together as his mother is dealing with cancer treatments. I am listening to this on audio and it has me hooked. The author is my age so we grew up during the same era but our mothers were very different. I'm a bit envious that he could have such a wonderful connection to his mother through books. 

Here are the first three paragraphs from Two Roads Books:

"We were nuts about the mocha in the waiting room at 

Memorial Sloan- Kettering’s outpatient care center. 

The coffee isn’t so good, and the hot chocolate is worse. But 

if, as Mom and I discovered, you push the “mocha” button, 

you see how two not- very- good things can come together to 

make something quite delicious. The graham crackers aren’t 

bad either.

The outpatient care center is housed on the very pleasant 

fourth fl oor of a handsome black steel and glass offi ce building in Manhattan on the corner of 53rd Street and Third Avenue. Its visitors are fortunate that it’s so pleasant, because they spend many hours there. This is where people with cancer wait to see their doctors and to be hooked up to a drip for doses of the life- prolonging poison that is one of the wonders of the modern medical world. By the late autumn of 2007, my mother and I began meeting there regularly. 

Our book club got its formal start with the mocha and one 

of the most casual questions two people can ask each other:

“What are you reading?” It’s something of a quaint question 

these days. More often in lulls of conversation people ask, 

“What movies have you seen?” or “Where are you going on 

vacation?” You can no longer assume, the way you could when 

I was growing up, that anyone is reading anything. But it’s a 

question my mother and I asked each other for as long as I 

can remember."

What do you think? Would you keep on reading 

or move on to something else?