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It was the women of afghanistan,my mother believed,who-once they'd been granted access to books and education- would be the salvation of the country
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Will Schwalbe |
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We had chosen as our next book club selection Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, as we'd both loved her 2003 novel The Namesake and her first book of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, which had won the Pulitzer in 1999.
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Will Schwalbe |
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I'd read in Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith,
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Will Schwalbe |
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I needed to remind myself that good news and bad news are often relative to your expectations, not anything absolute
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Will Schwalbe |
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Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, Sir Kevin, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time, one could go to New Zealand.' The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference, there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal
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Will Schwalbe |
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Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise
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Will Schwalbe |
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What's odd about commencement is that so many people think of it as the end of something, the end of high school or college--but that's not what the word means at all. It means the beginning, the start of something new.
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Will Schwalbe |
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A phrase the doctor used had reassured Mom--"treatable but not curable." --
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Will Schwalbe |
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Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas, a young writer originally from Boston who was now living and teaching in New York. Man Gone Down is another big, ambitious novel--about race, the American Dream, fatherhood, money, and love.
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Will Schwalbe |
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What does one say to someone who has just been diagnosed with such a dire illness?
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Will Schwalbe |
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Every year pancreatic cancer kills more than 35,000 people in America--it's the fourth leading cause of cancer death.
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Will Schwalbe |
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I gave people who didn't know what to say the best advice I could muster, which was that it was better to say anything rather than pretend that nothing was wrong.
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Will Schwalbe |
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A Thousand Splendid Suns, the new book by Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner.
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Will Schwalbe |
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was just that she felt you were missing the main point--you were focused on one thing when you should have been focused on another.
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Will Schwalbe |
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Mom had always taught all of us to examine decisions by reversibility--that is, to hedge our bets. When you couldn't decide between two things, she suggested you choose the one that allowed you to change course if necessary. Not the road less traveled
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Will Schwalbe |
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Mom had always taught all of us to examine decisions by reversibility--that is, to hedge our bets. When you couldn't decide between two things, she suggested you choose the one that allowed you to change course if necessary. Not the road less traveled but the road with the exit ramp.
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Will Schwalbe |
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The Etiquette of Illness, a book from 2004 by a social worker and psychotherapist named Susan Halpern,
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Will Schwalbe |
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The Etiquette of Illness, a book from 2004 by a social worker and psychotherapist named Susan Halpern, who is herself a cancer survivor. The subtitle is What to Say When You Can't Find the Words. But it's really about what to do when you feel scared that doing something, if it turns out to be the wrong thing, might be worse than doing nothing at all.
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Will Schwalbe |
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Halpern wants the reader to think about the difference between asking "How are you feeling?" and "Do you want me to ask how you're feeling?"
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Will Schwalbe |
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3. You don't have to talk all the time. Sometimes just being there is enough.
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Will Schwalbe |
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The Bite of the Mango,
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Will Schwalbe |
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It's three hours, and I know I probably won't feel up for it, but if I'm going to feel rotten, I'd rather feel rotten watching something wonderful than just sitting in the living room, looking at the wall.
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Will Schwalbe |
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Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog.
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Will Schwalbe |
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I asked Mom why she thought that was, and she pointed out that joy is a product not of whether characters live or die but of what they've realized and achieved, or how they are remembered.
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Will Schwalbe |
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We'd both already read several novels by Toibin: The Master and The Story of Night and The Blackwater Lightship.
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Will Schwalbe |
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Christopher Isherwood's Christopher and His Kind,
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Will Schwalbe |
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Ishmael Beah's memoir of his life as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone, A Long Way Gone.
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Will Schwalbe |
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d0fd5a9
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Kokoro, a remarkable novel by Natsume Soseki,
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Will Schwalbe |
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remarked to Mom how all the books we were reading then shared not just length but a certain theme: fate and the effects of the choices people make. "I think most good books share that theme," Mom said."
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Will Schwalbe |
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bd75a99
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Well, what were your favorite books?" "When?" "As a young girl." "Nancy Drew. I read dozens of them. I loved the idea of a girl detective."
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Will Schwalbe |
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remains for my family the perfect model of how you can be gone but ever present in the lives of people who loved you, in the same way that your favorite books stay with you for your entire life, no matter how long it's been since you turned the last page.
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Will Schwalbe |
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a045498
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She thought you should be able to keep your private life private for any reason or for no reason. She even felt that way about politicians--so long as they weren't hypocrites--and worried that we'd never find enough good and interesting people to run for office if we pried into every corner of their past.
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Will Schwalbe |
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1c5f31d
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Universal health care was always an issue Mom cared about, and the more care she got, the angrier she became that good medicine wasn't available for everyone in the United States. The pharmacy almost always provoked a political discussion or diatribe.
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Will Schwalbe |
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8d8876a
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There was one sure way to avoid being assigned an impromptu chore in our house--be it taking out the trash or cleaning your room--and that was to have your face buried in a book.
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Will Schwalbe |
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even the stay-at-home mothers subjected their kids to a kind of benign neglect back then.
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Will Schwalbe |
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Her new mantra was a piece of wisdom given to her by a friend of my sister who specialized in palliative care: "Make Plans and Cancel Them."
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Will Schwalbe |
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Not feeling well is no excuse for forgetting that there are other people in the world.
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Will Schwalbe |
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not. Both Mom and I had read it when it came out in 1999 and had recommended it to each other simultaneously. In
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Will Schwalbe |
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the book, Lamott says the two best prayers are "Help me, Help me, Help me" and "Thank you, Thank you, Thank you."
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Will Schwalbe |
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1a055b0
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The new Brooks novel is called People of the Book,
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Will Schwalbe |
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e3b961c
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The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly.
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Will Schwalbe |
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bfb39e4
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Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience by Susan Pedersen,
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Will Schwalbe |
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0cd1a2c
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The Uncommon Reader,
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Will Schwalbe |
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722fed7
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Feasting the Heart by Reynolds Price,
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Will Schwalbe |