“no, that is the great fallacy, the wisdom of the old”, wrote ernest hemingway in his literary masterpiece a farewell to arms. “They don’t become wise. They become careful.”
That paragraph is not only beautifully written, it’s so true. it’s the kind of observation that makes literature, both fiction and nonfiction, so valuable. Books, in the way that they help us navigate the murky waters of life, have a way of lighting up the world. what does it really mean to grow old? (You know, aside from the fact that your hair turns gray and your body is palpably less active.)
You are reading: Books about getting older
if you want the answers, or at least the deep thoughts of smart people struggling with those questions, you have to pick a book. here’s your reading list on the subject: a comprehensive rundown of books that make the slide into old age a little less scary. And for more amazing books, check out the 5 Books Bill Gates Says You Should Read This Summer.
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Oscar Wilde, the 19th century novelist, playwright, and taboo breaker, addresses the narcissistic obsession with youth. A young man named Dorian Gray realizes that his beauty will one day fade and is upset that a painting of him will not experience the same indignity. “I’m going to get old and ugly and hideous,” he complains. “but this image will remain forever young… if it were the other way around! if it was me who was going to be forever young, and the image that was going to grow old!” he gets the wish from him, and boy, does he learn to repent.
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Hemingway’s 1951 novel about an elderly fisherman named Santiago and his struggle to catch a mighty marlin speaks to the heart of all men’s fears about aging, and whether things that used to be easy are slipping away. And for more ways to face impending aging gracefully, learn the Top 100 Anti-Aging Secrets.
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“The past is fading and the present is a constant affront,” Ephron writes in these moving and heartfelt reflections on turning 69. “I can’t keep up.”
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The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer tackles middle age for the baby boomer generation, and it’s exactly as funny as it sounds. “The transformation is comparable to the one Clark Kent goes through,” writes Barry. “He takes off his glasses and becomes superman; you put on reading glasses and become…an old man.” And for more ways to look at life as a comedian like Barry would, he checks out 50 Puns So Bad They’re Actually Funny.
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Two women from different generations come together through stories from the past. the film version barely scratched the surface of this novel’s bittersweet musings on aging. “It’s funny, when you’re a kid you think time will never pass,” flagg writes. “But when you’re in your twenties, time passes like you’re on the fast train to memphis. I guess life just slips away from everyone. It sure did for me.”
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This Reading is a darkly comic British novel from 1973 about a group of elderly men and women who live together in a retirement home. but these veterans have no intention of quietly fading into the sunset. they are more concerned with whether they will have enough booze to get them through the night. as he once explained to amis, “these are five people in particular who wouldn’t behave the way they do if they weren’t old.” think of it as a bizarre breakfast club.
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You won’t find a better book about attending the funerals of old friends than this memoir, the last book from the guy who played obi-wan kenobi. “Nothing is desperately important,” she writes. “and the joy of life is just looking at it.”
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angelous writes simple observations that will have you spinning for months, reconsidering everything you thought you knew about being older and more mature. “I am convinced that most people do not grow,” she writes. “we get married and dare to have children and we call that growing up. i think what we do is mainly grow old. we carry an accumulation of years in our bodies and in our faces, but in general our true selves, the children inside, are innocent “. And shy as magnolias.” And if you want to be as wise a parent as Angelou, she learns the 40 Parenting Tricks to Raise a Wonderful Child.
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How do we really treat our elderly? beauvoir tries to discover in this disturbing non-fiction story what it means to grow older and more dependent. “Society cares for the individual only to the extent that he is profitable,” she writes. “The young know it. Their anxiety at entering social life coincides with the anguish of the old at being excluded from it.”
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This series of novels by the Egyptian author and Nobel Prize winner is, on the surface, only the chronology of a family over three generations. but it’s really about what it means to grow old in the midst of cultural and social change, as what is considered a traditional way of life is forced to adapt and evolve to modern ideas.
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A woman moves back in with her parents after graduating from college and decides she’d rather go back to reading books from her childhood and hanging out with old friends than figure out what she wants to do with her life. So, you know… fiction. When she babysits for neighbors who have lost a daughter, she gains a new perspective on her life and what it means to leave college life carefree and venture into adulthood.
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You’d think the 61-year-old retiree from “teaching fifth grade at a second-rate private school for boys” might finally enjoy some r&r. Not so for the protagonist of this novel, who becomes attached to a thief and ends up in the hospital, hiring an “external hard drive”, his fancy name for a nurse who helps him remember names and appointments, to facilitate his recovery. /p>
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According to this 1976 bestseller, it’s not just childhood that falls into predictable patterns like “the terrible twos.” each decade of adult life has its unique challenges and patterns, from the rocky 20s through 30s (when all the options that once worked perfectly suddenly aren’t so right anymore) to the borderline decade, between 35 and 45,” when you feel a sudden time crunch,” sheehy says.
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yeah, okay, it’s a book about a guy who runs a record store and makes a lot of mix tapes. but it’s also ultimately about what it means to grow old and realizing that the obsessions of his youth must evolve and change as he ages. this is a story that reminds us that it’s okay not to get everything you want and that an adult relationship sometimes involves compromises.
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four volumes of journals that gray began writing at age 65 and continued through a battle with cancer and until his death at 71. there are many life lessons in the ups and downs of his later years, describing the British playwright. as “the beginning of my death”.
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political columnist and founding editor of slate leads baby boomers through the minefield of midlife. “Sometimes I feel like an explorer of my generation,” writes the man diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at age 43, “sent forth to experience in my fifties what even the healthiest boomers will experience in their sixties, seventy or eighty.” /p>
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Everything about this memoir, dealing with the inconveniences of getting older and being able to do less than you’ve grown accustomed to, is more fun than you might expect from the subject. yes, it is about getting sick and losing control and requiring the care of others. but he approaches this unavoidable part of life with tremendous humor. “I’ve always wanted a pug and now I can’t get one,” complains Athill, “because buying a puppy when you’re too old to walk it is unfair.”
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probably the funniest book ever written about menopause, or what author loh calls the “triple-m generation”: the middle-aged menopausal mom. And for more amazing reading, stock up on the 40 Books Every Woman Over 40 Should Have On Her Shelf.
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Originally published in 1952, this story of disaffected youth is as relatable today as it was more than sixty years ago. “the mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause,” explains mr. antolini, holden’s favorite teacher. “whereas the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for oneself.” It’s no wonder this is one of the 40 books every man over 40 should have on his bookshelf.
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This book, the 12th in a series, about a 70-year-old widow trapped in her Pittsburgh home, “her life is no longer an urgent or necessary matter.” Equal parts funny and sad, it’s an oh-so-real-sounding novel about struggling to rebuild your life after losing a loved one.
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This story of four Chinese immigrant mothers and their daughters is wonderfully universal and perfectly encapsulates the struggle of aging parents to remain relevant in their children’s lives. “A girl is like a young tree,” she writes so. “You must stand tall and listen to your mother standing next to you. That is the only way to grow up strong and upright. But if you bend over to listen to other people, you will become crooked and weak. You will fall to the ground at the first strong wind. and then you will be like a weed, growing wildly in any direction, running along the ground until someone pulls you out and throws you away.”
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The comedian and former playboy model writes beautifully about growing old with a spouse and the comfort and security that comes with it. “You have someone who will come and tell you if you have broccoli in your teeth,” she says. “someone who lies to you and tells you that you don’t need a facelift and can see the triceps you’ve been working diligently to unearth, someone who has seen you naked numerous times without laughing or cringing or running screaming into the next room “.
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Five women who have been best friends since high school continue to meet every month (even 30 years later), wearing red hats and purple suits from the Atlanta chapter of Ladies Who Lunch. women support each other through difficult marriages (there are affairs and mediocre love lives and even abusive husbands) and show that some friendships grow stronger with age.
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if david sedaris were a woman approaching 50 years old and not so happy about it, this book is what she would have written.
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Have you ever wondered what happened to the three musketeers when they reached middle age? This sequel from 1845, written by the original author, tries to answer that eternal question: what happens when you stop being a hero and start needing to find a seat because, hey, your back is so sore and your feet, oh no? doesn’t even help me get started.
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From Plato to Shakespeare’s King Lear, Small examines our cultural ideas of what it means to have a good (and long) life. She takes a fascinating look at Saul Bellow, who said that growing old “is not a story of progress, or a quest, or a story of improvement, but a tailspin through time to death.”
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Is it possible to keep a sex life alive, even at age 60 as a cancer survivor living with a colostomy? is a novel that gives hope and humor to those who think age and illness might have made them irrelevant.
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“we always think there’s enough time to do things with other people. time to say things to them. and then something happens and then we’re left hanging on to words like ‘yes.'” This tale of the aging curmudgeon next door is riddled with these kinds of observations, which will make you look at the cranky old men in your neighborhood with a more sympathetic eye.
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These fascinating essays cover the ups and downs of a woman’s life from middle age to old age. “I have finally recognized my body for what it is,” she writes. “a personality delivery system, expressly designed to get my character from one place to another,
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A 79-year-old woman decides she’s tired of the easy life of retirement. so she starts robbing banks. really. everything is part of a plan to finance new adventures of the circle of friends older than her, who call themselves the league of retirees.
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“Old age is an insult,” the 70-year-old woman recovering from a hip fracture tells the reader. “old age is a slap in the face. it sabotages a brilliant mind.” And that’s just the beginning of the truth bombs in this endlessly relatable novel.
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This book is a Pulitzer Prize winner and the fourth and final novel in a series on the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, whom critics have called “America’s cloudy barometer.” Retired and living in Florida, Rabbit battles heart disease and makes peace with life’s many disappointments. “Life is a hill that gets steeper the higher you go,” Irving writes.
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This memoir from one of life’s greatest contributors takes a playful look at how we try to slow down the aging process by holding on to the past. Spitznagel, realizing that he is now middle-aged, decides to track down all the vinyl albums from his youth; not just copies, but the exact records, with the scratches and skips he remembers, and the lp covers covered in his familiar handwriting.
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This collection of short stories, from one of the greatest living writers, is filled with anxious characters struggling with the emotional weight of aging. As Saunders writes, “Dad once said, trust your mind, steal. If it smells [bad] but has Happy Birthday written on it and a candle stuck in it, what is it?”
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so many astute observations about aging in dickens’ seventh novel, especially in relation to the character of solomon gills, the elderly proprietor of a nautical instrument store. “I am an old-fashioned man in an old-fashioned store,” he says, “on a street that is not the same as I remember it. I have fallen back in time and I am too old to take it back.”
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A 37-year-old businessman listens to the Beatles’ song “Norwegian Wood” and is transported back to his college days in 1960s Tokyo, when life seemed so much simpler and more purposeful. “Memory is a fun thing,” Murakami writes. “When I was on the scene, I hardly paid any attention to it. I never stopped to think of it as something that would leave a lasting impression, certainly I never imagined that eighteen years later I would remember it in such detail.”
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The TV and movie icon writes about how he lived into his 90s and still has the energy and enthusiasm of a 20-year-old. “All those pinches and tucks don’t make you look younger, just weirder,” he writes. “my advice? let the outside sag and wrinkle; change what’s inside.”
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The acclaimed poet and novelist celebrated her 80th birthday with this collection, in which she explains: “I am a foreigner in the land of old age and I have tried to learn their language.”
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First published in 1978, this award-winning novel follows a 70-year-old woman who returns to her small hometown after a lifetime of trying to escape, only to discover that the past isn’t quite as she remembers it. .
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just like dr. seuss introduced us to the wonders of the imagination in our childhood, he gives us a hilarious warning about what to expect in old age, when we’re dragged from doctor to doctor for seemingly endless medical tests. what the hell is a spleen reset and muffler repair? It may sound like a joke, but the closer you get to your senior year, the less fantastical and fictional everything seems. And if you need help facing your next birthday(s), steal Pierce Brosnan’s secret trick to aging gracefully.
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