As an English student with already plenty to read for school, finding good books for your free time can be a challenge. After reading Tuesdays With Morrie, it quickly topped my favorites books list. With any luck, you’ll find some inspiration to pick up or even put down this book.
Note: The “albums” are what I listened to while reading these books.
*Spoiler Warning*
Album: Punisher (with a focus on the track Saviour Complex)
I went into Tuesdays with Morrie completely blind. I didn’t know what to expect, just that it was a memoir. I had no intention of reading one of my now favourite books over the course of these past few weeks, but I did. Tuesdays with Morrie is a book I think anyone would benefit from reading at least once in their life. I know for certain I will be coming back to it again, and I honestly can’t wait.
I loved Mitch Albom’s writing style. The book reads like a personal, very detailed diary, how you would expect a memoir to be (or at least how I expected a memoir to be). Tuesdays with Morrie was my first memoir and has set the bar high, to say the least.
The book follows the life of Mitch Albom and his old university professor, Morrie Schwartz, from Mitch’s perspective. The book starts with Mitch talking about who Morrie is and what he’s like. He continues by talking about their relationship in college and then his career after—all leading to the moment when he sees his old estranged professor one night on TV. The two rekindle their lost relationship, meeting in Morrie’s house every Tuesday and talking about lessons and the teachings of life while Morrie slowly loses his life to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This degenerative disease—formerly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease—is a progressive neurological disorder that, overtime, shuts down your body. The disease leaves you immobile, unable to do just about anything but breath until you can’t do that any longer.
The narrative of the story flips between the past and the present, giving it a nice flow throughout the book. I never felt rushed or confused with where we were in time, Mitch sets every “jump” up to be easily understood.
At the end of the book, there was a little extra that I was not expecting. I was lucky enough to be given the 25th-anniversary edition of the book. This addition was given a few extra pages from Albom, a reprise of the original. He addresses the reader and gives a brief explanation of how the book came to be. It was written to help Morrie and his wife with his medical expenses, and it fully covered them and more. He also shares the letter sent to their eventual publisher. The email summarized the layout of the book, and sweetly, he ended the email the same way he would eventually the book, by saying, “The teachings go on.”
That phrase perfectly encapsulates the message behind the book and what Mitch and Morrie wanted to say. They wanted to highlight the important, under-discussed meanings of life. The book confronts death like I have never seen before. With Morrie being only months from facing death, he becomes this wealth of knowledge of what is most important in life. Looking back, thinking about what he did and didn’t do, and simply accepting his life for what it is. Believing it’s never too late to start or change something is one of the biggest takeaways I got from this book.
I will definitely be revisiting this book later on in life and will be 100% recommending it to others.