Welcome back to Goodreads Monday! It’s been a very hot minute since I did one but I figured I might as well get back into it! This weekly meme was started by @Lauren’s Page Turners and it invites you to pick a book from your TBR and explain why you want to read it. Easy enough, right? Feel free to join in if you want to! I’ll be using a random number generator to pick my books from my insanely long GR Want-to-read list.*

*Sorry if a book has been featured twice. I need to make better note of which ones I’ve done already!

This week’s featured book is A Short History of Falling: Everything I Observed About Love Whilst Dying by Joe Hammond. This is non-fiction that was published in 2019.

We keep an old shoebox, Gill and I, nestled in a drawer in our room. It’s filled with thirty-three birthday cards for our two young sons: one for every year I’ll miss until they’re twenty-one. I wrote them because, since the end of 2017, I’ve been living with – and dying from – motor neurone disease.

This book is about the process of saying goodbye. To my body, as I journey from unexpected clumsiness to a wheelchair that resembles a spacecraft, with rods and pads and dials and bleeps. To this world, as I play less of a part in it and find myself floating off into unlighted territory. To Gill, my wife. To Tom and Jimmy.

A Short History of Falling is about the sadness (and the anger, and the fear), but it’s about what’s beautiful too. It’s about love and fatherhood, about the precious experience of observing my last moments with this body, surrounded by the people who matter most. It’s about what it feels like to confront the fact that my family will persist through time with only a memory of me. In many ways, it has been the most amazing time of my life.

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Why do I want to read it?

I honestly forgot that I had this book on my TBR and for a second I had no idea when I first heard about this book or what it was doing on my “want-to-read” shelf. And then I remembered that Emer reviewed it on her blog and made it sound so compelling that I knew I wanted to read it at some point! As we all know, I don’t often read non-fiction and this definitely doesn’t sound like a NF that I would normally pick up but it sounds like it’ll be a moving and somewhat refreshing read!

Have you read this book or is it on your TBR? Does it sound like something you’d fancy reading?