Ageing Well

From Strength to Strength

Arthur C. Brooks · 2022

Brooks starts from an uncomfortable fact, that the sharp skills which made us good at our careers tend to fade earlier than we’d like, and turns it into something genuinely hopeful. His argument is that a second kind of strength grows as the first one fades: wisdom, teaching, connection, the ability to see the pattern of things. It’s a clear-eyed, warm guide to loosening your grip on the striving self and stepping into the version of you that later life actually rewards. If you’re bracing against getting older, this quietly reframes the whole thing.

This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism

Ashton Applewhite · 2016

Applewhite is furious, in the best way, about how much of our dread of ageing is really just absorbed prejudice, ours and everyone else’s. She takes apart the idea that getting older is mostly decline, and makes a bracing case that much of what we fear about age is a story we’ve been sold rather than a fact of life. Reading it is like having someone throw the windows open. You come away lighter, and a good deal less afraid of your own future.

Elderhood

Louise Aronson · 2019

Aronson is a geriatrician, and this is part memoir, part history, part quiet argument that old age deserves to be treated as a real and valuable stage of life rather than a medical problem to be managed. She writes about her patients, and her own parents, with enormous tenderness and a doctor’s clear eye. It’s a big, humane book that changes how you think about the last third of life, both other people’s and, in time, your own.

The Stone Diaries

Carol Shields · 1993

Shields tells the whole life of one ordinary woman, from birth to old age, and somehow makes an ordinary life feel vast. It’s especially good on the later years, on how a person keeps being entirely themselves even as the world starts to overlook them. It won the Pulitzer, and it’s quietly devastating in the way it shows a life adding up to something only you can really see from the inside. A novel that makes you pay closer attention to your own.

The Summer Book

Tove Jansson · 1972

A grandmother and her small granddaughter spend their summers together on a tiny Finnish island, and not much happens, which is rather the point. Jansson, who created the Moomins, has a light touch and a deep one at the same time. The grandmother is old, a little frail, and completely herself, and the book is full of the plain wisdom she passes on almost without meaning to. It’s short, funny and wise, and it treats old age as a season with its own particular richness.

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window

Jonas Jonasson · 2009

On his hundredth birthday, Allan Karlsson climbs out of his care-home window and goes on the run, and what follows is gloriously silly. But underneath the caper is a cheering idea: that a life isn’t over just because everyone assumes it should be, and that you’re allowed to keep being surprising right to the end. When ageing well starts to feel too earnest, this is the antidote. Read it for the sheer, ridiculous fun of a man who refuses to sit down quietly.