What do you feel is the central theme of the book?
Created: 09/24/12
Replies: 12
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Join Date: 06/14/11
Posts: 34
LOVE. Love of family and love of experiences found in a good book. Great love for both. Solid maturity in facing the inevitable using a tool (reading) to show love and continue experiencing a satisfactory life while it lasts.
The experience here was itself a "good ending".
Join Date: 03/13/12
Posts: 552
This book reinforces the importance of having quality time with a loved one for whom there is a definite final goodbye looming. Spending time with the loved one is very important. Those will be memories you will cherish. This book also shows that finding a common interest that is worthwhile and interesting (books!!) to talk about in this final stage of a loved one's life is valuable to all involved.
Join Date: 06/13/11
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Join Date: 04/28/11
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Love and the capacity of literature to help you through life's darkest situations. Personally, books have helped me stay connected to many in my life, but they have really helped with my teenage sons and nephews. They are always amazed when I ask "What are you reading?" and I either have read the book or know the story. Talking about books has given us many great conversations and also provides a forum to discuss some of life's most difficult issues (and the occasional embarassing question!).
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Communication between people is so necessary and so difficult to do on more than a superficial level. Books can be a way to enter into those conversations in a non-threatening way, a way to share emotions when one isn't comfortable doing it openly.
Join Date: 10/13/12
Posts: 9
I'm only about a third of the way through the book, but it seems to me that communication is the main theme of this book, and the means of communication for Will and his mother, Mary Anne, is literature. In their "book club" discussions, their commonality is a shared love of books. It's easy for them to converse about the books they each love. Of course, entangled in the talks about the characters in their books are their own emotions, Will's and MaryAnne's, that is. Exposing their own feelings and fears directly would make them vulnerable. It's easier to talk about the feelings, hopes, dreams, etc. of fictional characters.
I wonder, though. It seems to me that Mary Anne would be able to talk openly to Will. Perhaps, she recognizes that Will needs the book club in order to communicate his feelings to her.
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