AVL Digital Nomads - Book Club

December 2026 Selection - When Breach Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
Amazon - GoodReads

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.

Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.

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Welcome to our monthly Book Club! We’re a small, friendly group that gets together for fun, thoughtful conversations about a different book each month.

Finished the whole book? Great. Only made it through a few chapters? Still come. Didn’t read it at all but the discussion sounds interesting? Honestly, you’re welcome too.
We meet on the first Tuesday of every month.

One of the best things about this group is that we keep it relatively small and guide the conversation, so it doesn’t turn into three people talking while everyone else quietly questions their life choices. Everyone has a chance to jump in, share their thoughts, and explore the book’s characters, themes, writing, and bigger ideas.

You definitely don’t need to be a literary expert. Whether you read constantly or you’re trying to get back into it, this is a relaxed place to discover new books, hear different perspectives, and meet some great people along the way.