Book review of A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last by Stephen Levine, 1997

You know the old maxim, “Live each Day as though it were your last … and someday you’ll be right.” The premise of this book is to live each Year as though it were your last. So unbuckle your seatbelts, folks, because you’re in for a tranquil week-long read, if not a year-long ride.

Of this 177-page book, I found only 28 pages, or a sixth of the book, worth pondering and therefore worth reading. That means five-sixths of the book is unsubstantiated mysticism. That would be disappointing if you were playacting that you had only one year left to live, so only limited time left to read any books. But wait.

Only 28 pages? Yet 28 pages is quite sufficient. Those few pages make this book more worthy than the hundreds of other books sitting idly in my personal library that I have not yet read and most likely will never read, no matter how many years I might have left to live.

(Confession: I skimmed or skipped many of the exercises and the expanded life stories, basically whatever passages were italicized. Thank you, Mr Levine, for making such texts so easy for me to identify and therefore to skim or skip.)

Sprinkled throughout the book, several lines are noteworthy, especially those single-sentence statements quoted from truly dying patients. If cumulated together they amount to only a page, so I’ve omitted them from my list that follows.

Here, then, is my Over-the-Cliff Notes edition, the aforementioned 28 pages:

·      Chapter 16, only its first two-thirds, pages 69-82.

·      Chapter 20, the entire chapter, pages 114-117.

·      Chapter 27, only page 119, and only its 1st full paragraph.

·      Chapter 28, the entire chapter, pages 122-126.

·      Chapter 31, only pages 131-132.

·      Chapter 36, the entire chapter, pages 154-155.

Sum and substance, read these 28 pages first, in case you die before you complete reading the rest of the book. And if you happen not to die, then you can always return later to read the whole dang thing, thereby reading these 28 pages twice, the very pages that indeed are worth rereading. As bespoken in Hindu/Buddhist/hocus-pocus Eastern socio-religious land and in Nietzschean socio-philosophic land, the Eternal Return.