Son, dying mom bond via 'End of Your Life Book Club'

• Reading 'is the opposite of dying'
• From Stieg Larsson to T.S. Eliot
• A two-person book club - without food

It was the smallest and most intimate of book clubs: just two readers, an elderly mother and her middle-aged son.

But between the time Mary Anne Schwalbe was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2007,and died nearly two years later, she and her son read and discussed nearly 50 books.

Which is the subject of The End of Your Life Book Club (Knopf), the new book by Will Schwalbe, who reports that while on his cross-country tour of bookstores and libraries, he's learning that "two-person book clubs may be more common than I thought."

Most don't involve someone who's dying, as his mother was. A woman told Schwalbe that she and her grandson are making their way together through Suzanne Collins' popular trilogy, The Hunger Games. As he pictures it, "Two people on the edge of their seats waiting to see what happens next and sharing that experience."

And then there was the reader who says that as soon as she finished The End of Your Life Book Club, she picked up the phone to call her mother (in perfectly good health) to ask, "What are you reading?"

Which is the question Schwalbe asked his 73-year-old mom in a New York hospital waiting room.

Her answer was Wallace Stegner's 1987 novel, Crossing to Safety, about the lifelong friendship of two couples. As the novel opens, one of the women is dying of cancer.

That novel, Schwalbe says, would give him and his mother "a way to discuss some of the things she was facing and some of the things I was facing."

Both were avid readers. Schwalbe, 50, is the former editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books and founder of Cookstr.com, about cookbooks and recipes. His mom was a retired teacher, a former admissions director at Harvard and Radcliffe and founding director of the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children.

That day in the hospital, Schwalbe told his mom that if they read "books at more or less the same time, then it's sort of like being in a book club."

"But don't people in book clubs cook things?" she asked.

He laughed and said, "We'll have the world's only foodless book club."

Until she died at 75, mother and son shared a broad range of new and old books -- from Stieg Larsson's best-selling mystery, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,to T.S. Eliot's 1935 verse drama, Murder in the Cathedral, about the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Beckett in 1170. (Schwalbe's mom had once been in a student production.)

Unlike traditional book clubs that involve a dozen or so readers, Schwalbe says, "When there's only two of you, you can't really fake having read the book."

From "day one of her diagnosis," his mom knew she was dying, he says. "Stage 4 (cancer) is the end of the line; there is no Stage 5." But while they were sharing books, "We wouldn't be the sick person and the well person. We would simply be a mother and a son entering new worlds together."

The books also provided what he calls "ballast -- something we both needed amid the chaos and upheaval of mom's illness."

Some of their selections dealt with mortality, such as The Etiquette of Illness by Susan Halpern, a psychotherapist and cancer survivor. Others didn't, including Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader, a novella that imagines the Queen of England becoming a serious reader.

Schwalbe says he and his mom didn't talk much about their club, or actually name it: "We talked about the books, and we talked about our lives."

In the end, he says, his mom taught him that "reading isn't the opposite of doing. It's the opposite of dying. I will never be able to read my mom's favorite books without thinking of her -- and when I pass them on and recommend them, I'll know that some of what made her goes with them, that some of my mother will live on in those readers."

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