My wife and I embraced that idea as two courses of chemotherapy and surgery failed and ended all hope of her recovery. Gawande doesn’t so much recommend hospice as help us to understand why it’s a humane, life-asserting choice. The choice is, finally, ours.

“Being Mortal” is accessible, engaging, enlightening and important.

Les Cohen

Reno, Nev.

The Overstory

I read “The Overstory,” by Richard Powers, this past year and it changed the way I, at 62 years old, look at the natural world and the planet Earth, as well as its inhabitants. I will never look at a tree the same way again. The information I gleaned regarding the relationship between trees and the planet, their underground and “secret” life, will ever color the way I look at beautiful scenery or, in many cases, the devastation of the planet by human hands, or its natural devastation by nature’s hands.

I have gained a new respect for persons who make sacrifices and life changes, and who rage against the dying of the planet by educating and haranguing the rest of us about the thoughtlessness with which we treat Earth. I observe the trees in my yard, engaged in miraculous natural and chemical workings, and wonder what’s happening under the ground, in the secret life I know nothing of.

Jane Vereen

Sioux City, Iowa

An Unknown Woman

I wandered into a bookstore in Newburyport, Mass., on a “sick day” from work I hated in 1986. Poking through the stacks, I alighted on “An Unknown Woman,” by Alice Koller, a memoir of her winter spent on Cape Cod deconstructing her life and personality. What was hers and what had society imposed upon her? How did she want to go forward in her life, living consciously? Alone, walking the beaches with her dog, Logos, she dismantled herself and her previous life.

By the time I had finished the book, I resolved to quit my job, get my pilot’s license and backpack in Europe before I embarked on a new career as an air traffic controller. It was the beginning of consciousness for me at the age of 26. I can’t stop thinking about that seemingly random sliver of luck.

Elle Pea

Rockland, Me.

Peace Like a River

I read Leif Enger’s “Peace Like a River” shortly after my grandmother passed away. She was a tough Irish broad with a deep spirituality and a bossy bark befitting a mother of nine. It was hard to envision a world without a larger-than-life figure like her. Then I read the “Be Jubilant, My Feet” chapter in Enger’s novel. It gave me the most tangible, connected sense of heaven I have ever had. It allowed me to picture Gram in the new, joyous world beyond the beyond that she always believed in. And because of Enger’s words, now I believe in it, too.

Sara Carpi

Weston, Mass.

The Diary of Anne Frank

When I was 9 years old, I read “The Diary of Anne Frank” and instantly fell in love with Anne’s spirit and feisty nature; I felt that we were friends, somehow. I wept not only for her death, but also because my father’s side of the family had served in the German military in World War II. I felt that, in some way, my family had some responsibility for her death. I vowed in that moment, with the passion that only a 9-year-old girl can muster, that if I’d been there, I would have been different. I would have stood up for what was right and fair and good. I would not have been afraid to risk myself to save Anne, and others like her.