When I reached the fifty-year mark, thoughts about the finiteness of life and death started to crowd my mind. They were not morbid thoughts but the simple realization that my time was limited. I am afraid of suffering but not of death. My regrets are mostly about what I might be missing out on. I want to try many things; I want to read and watch more than I have the time. Above all, I am insanely jealous of younger people, as many of my scientific and technological questions will not be answered before my death. I am envious that they will read books that have yet to be written.

In this book, which is part memoir and part meditation about dealing with the inevitability of death, the author touches upon all the questions and doubts that I have been pondering. Not that we always agreed, but to hear another person articulating the same or similar thoughts is extremely satisfying. His approach to the question is perceptive, deeply philosophical, and emotionally poignant but funny at the same time.

I would not recommend this book to someone still young enough to imagine that life will go on. It is not the theoretical understanding of death that we all do, but a sense of urgency that time is running out. Everything meaningful I do now is a result of this intense realization. But for those who feel that way, this book is a must-read. Only Julian Barnes can turn such a heavy subject into a funny, thoughtful, and engaging read.

It's definitely not his strongest work. I really enjoy Barnes' novels. But his short stories, for the most part, and his essays (except for the ones that lurk in his novels) leave me cold. It picks up toward the ends, and, all in all, it is not without some useful insights, but as a truly satisfying exploration into the subject of human mortality, it comes up short. True fans should read it for its autobiographical insights. Anyone else is probably better served by the novels.

Such a frustrating read...

He raises every possible inquiry into death and dying I can think of, so props to him for that, BUT as soon as they're introduced, he veers away into some quite frankly tedious and memoir about his parents or his brother and the capricious nature of memory. If he wanted to write a memoir, write a memoir. if he wanted to pursue and inquiry into how he feels about death write that, not a melange of the two which does neither particular service. You get an idea or concept about death/dying for a maximum of two paragraphs, then two pages of the memoir stuff. I assume the memoir is there to illuminate the concept of death under study (it rarely does), or to allow him to probe back into his own upbringing for where his notions came from (it does, but unconvincingly). ironically, in the end his inquiry comes across as philosophical musings, the main charge against his brother who is an academic philosopher by profession and who Barnes constantly opposes himself to his brother's philosophical way of thinking about the world.

Is death nothingness? Julian Barnes reluctantly says yes and that nothingness is what he is afraid of in this cleverly named but ultimately sad book. He logically concludes that with no hope of a God there is no hope. But why is he so convinced there is no God? Reading this brilliant and sometimes funny agnostic/atheist actually made my faith in God stronger.

Despite multiple attempts, I just could not get into this.

I sense a strange incongruency. My date for reading this book on Goodreads is May 2010 yet I distinctly recall reading this at Halloween the first year we lived in our house. I also recall reading one of the anecdotes to two friends, one of whom died shortly thereafter from cancer. I still think of Barnes chiding his final reader and smile. I am struggling today, keeping matters in a certain order when my impulse is to flee. We are on holiday next week and I am working quite a bit before then and I find it irrelevant to parse the causes of my dysfunction.

Totally lost my attention for a while, somewhat because it was just too gloomy for me to handle for a while, but an interesting look at the fear of death, mortality and meaninglessness

Some 15 years ago, Julian Barnes turned 60 and wrote Nothing to Be Frightened of, his mediation on death as filtered through his experience with the deaths of family and friends, as well as those of literary precedents and what THEY had to say about it. An essayist's stream of consciousness, the book made me by turns come to terms with my own (no doubt upcoming) death, and fear it all the more, and yet rightly makes the point that it probably won't change my eventual approach to it, or to the life that precedes it. Death, memory, identity, posterity, the existence of God, the notion of free will... Barnes dissects it all in a running conversation that essentially dissects himself and the concept of author with his usual wit and literary verve. He makes terror and despair fun, but also thought-provoking, and if I admit to tearing up here and giggling there, I must also testify to my having to go back and reread several paragraphs when some point made me reflect, without first stopping my eyes from their scanning motion, on my own attitudes, opinions and memories on the topic discussed.

Julian Barnes' reflections upon death, our fear of it (especially his), and past writers' grappling with the same problem. It's funny and honest and largely devoid of sentiment. Don't expect any reassurances; he's not offering any.

When we fall in love, we hope—both egotistically and altruistically—that we shall be finally, truly seen: judged and approved. Of course, love does not always bring approval: being seen may just as well lead to a thumbs-down and a season in hell.

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I used to believe, when I was 'just' a reader, that writers, because they wrote books where truth was found, because they described the world, because they saw into the human heart, because they grasped both the particular and the general and were able to re-create both in free yet structured forms, because they understood, must therefore be more sensitive—also less vain, less selfish—than other people. Then I became a writer, and started meeting other writers, and studied them, and concluded that the only difference between them and other people, the only, single way in which they were better, was that they were better writers. They might indeed be sensitive, perceptive, wise, generalizing and particularizing—but only at their desks and in their books. When they venture out into the world, they regularly behave as if they have left all their comprehension of human behaviour stuck in their typescripts. It's not just writers either. How wise are philosophers in their private lives?