Have you ever wondered what you could do to make Colorado Springs more Age Friendly?
By looking at Innovations in Aging’s website and by following us on Facebook, you can stay up to date with all the latest Age Friendly news and events in Colorado Springs. Beyond all of these actions, you can make Colorado Springs a better place to age by reading books that expand knowledge about aging and seek to end stigma associated with getting older.
Below is a list of some of our favorite books. We encourage you to consider one of these books as your next read, and we hope you share the list with your friends.
This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism
By: Ashton Applewhite
People are happiest at the beginnings and the ends of their lives. The vast majority of Americans over 65 live independently. The older people get, the less afraid they are of dying. Aging is a natural, lifelong, powerful process. So how come so many of us unthinkingly assume that depression, diapers, and dementia lie ahead? That the 20th century’s astonishing leap in life expectancy is a disaster-in-the making? Underlying all the hand-wringing is ageism: discrimination that sidelines and silences older people.
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
By: Atul Gawande
Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should.
Through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own patients and family, Gawande reveals the suffering this dynamic has produced.
By: Paul H. Irving 
An aging revolution is changing the world, a titanic shift that will alter every aspect of human existence. The Upside of Aging moves beyond the stereotypes of dependency and decline to look at aging in a new way.
The chapter authors, all prominent thought leaders, reveal the remarkable upside for health, work and entrepreneurship, volunteerism, innovation, and education, as longevity and declining birth rates create a mature population of unprecedented size and significance.
Life Gets Better: The Unexpected Pleasures of Growing Older
By: Wendy Lustbader 
From our earliest lives, we are told that our youth will be the best time of our lives-that the energy and vitality of youth are the most important qualities a person can possess, and that everything that comes after will be a sad decline. But in reality, says Wendy Lustbader, youth is not the golden era it is often made out to be. For many, it is a time riddled with anxiety, angst, confusion, and the torture of uncertainty. Conversely, the media often feeds us a vision of growing older as a journey of defeat and diminishment. They are dead wrong. As Lustbader counters, “Life gets better as we get older, on all levels except the physical.”
Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America
By: Margaret Morganroth Gullette
In Agewise, renowned cultural critic Margaret Morganroth Gullette reveals that much of what we dread about aging is actually the result of ageism—which we can, and should, battle as strongly as we do racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry. Drawing on provocative and under-reported evidence from biomedicine, literature, economics, and personal stories, Gullette probes the ageism that drives discontent with our bodies, our selves, and our accomplishments—and makes us easy prey for marketers who want to sell us an illusory vision of youthful perfection.
Do you have any Age Friendly reading suggestions? We would love to hear from you.
