Here are 100 books that How to Be Sick fans have personally recommended if you like
How to Be Sick.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I felt, after the AIDS crisis, as if I had been one person before it and another after it. I lost so many friends, collaborators, colleagues, and then finally, my own lover, I felt like the shell-shocked survivor of a war after it at least abated somewhat. Then my two sisters and both my parents died, and I became someone whose topic, no matter how veiled it is, is grief and loss. I am a living coffin on its way to a funeral to the sound of a cortège I composed.
I didn’t know if I could recommend a play here, but reading this one is how I first experienced it because it premiered in London. I hadn’t seen it yet, so I read its two monumental parts, “Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika,” on a typewritten marked-up rehearsal script someone had lent me.
Quite simply, Tony Kushner wrote THE play for my generation, a generation that lost probably half of itself to an awful plague most people, especially the government, ignored until it was too late. When my lover Jeffrey died, I went to the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park and wept because Tony had given it to me in his play, a monument for the AIDS generation.
Finally seeing it on Broadway, with Jeffrey, as he was dying, was like having my DNA scratched and resurfaced into something other than who I was before it. It was shape-shifting, soul-stirring, and salve…
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes includes Part One, Millennium Approaches and Part Two, Perestroika
“Glorious. A monumental, subversive, altogether remarkable masterwork…Details of specific catastrophes may have changed since this Reagan-era AIDS epic won the Pulitzer and the Tony, but the real cosmic and human obsessions—power, religion, sex, responsibility, the future of the world—are as perilous, yet as falling-down funny, as ever.” –Linda Winer, Newsday
"A vast, miraculous play... provocative, witty and deeply upsetting... a searching and radical rethinking of American political drama." - Frank Rich, New York Times
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
Like my main character, I’m a Norwegian writer with ties to the US, who grew up with various chronic illnesses. I discovered the reason for much of my trouble when I was diagnosed with endometriosis. Isolated and in pain, I have always turned to books. I craved seeing my life reflected. Since Please Read This Leaflet Carefully came out, I’ve heard from many readers. I hope that it can help people who haven’t seen themselves in art before. This list addresses the needs of a life with chronic illness and pain: guidance, darkness, humor, comfort, and poetry. I hope these books will help you as much as they did me.
This collection, published by Bloodaxe Books, categorizes poems loosely by theme and contains a treasure trove of the best poems to help you keep on living when life is too hard. There is a wide range of themes, as well as some uplifting poems that explore everything beautiful about being alive.
Staying Alive is an international anthology of 500 life-affirming poems fired by belief in the human and the spiritual at a time when much in the world feels unreal, inhuman and hollow. These are poems of great personal force connecting our aspirations with our humanity, helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves. Many people turn to poetry only at unreal times, whether for consolation in loss or affirmation in love, or when facing other extremes and anxieties. Staying Alive includes many of the great modern love poems and elegies, but it also shows the power…
Like my main character, I’m a Norwegian writer with ties to the US, who grew up with various chronic illnesses. I discovered the reason for much of my trouble when I was diagnosed with endometriosis. Isolated and in pain, I have always turned to books. I craved seeing my life reflected. Since Please Read This Leaflet Carefully came out, I’ve heard from many readers. I hope that it can help people who haven’t seen themselves in art before. This list addresses the needs of a life with chronic illness and pain: guidance, darkness, humor, comfort, and poetry. I hope these books will help you as much as they did me.
This is the first book where I read about experiences of childhood illness similar to my own. Reading it was both shocking and deeply cathartic in a way that felt almost dangerous. It is also a cold hard look at class, age, and intergenerational trauma in relation to health and healthcare in the US. It exists in its own category in my mind. All I can say is read it, just not on a bad pain day.
Diagnosed with cancer at age twelve and perilously pregnant at eighteen, surviving surgeries and violent accidents: sometimes you can't believe Bee Lavender is still alive; sometimes you think nothing could kill her. Bee Lavender holds nothing back as she recounts her life spent in and out of hospitals and her subsequent dissociation from her own body and emotions. She struggles with health problems from birth, which are compounded by her surroundings, including frequent encounters with street fights, domestic violence and poverty. Her voice is as strong as the front she puts up for the multitude of doctors she sees, and…
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
Like my main character, I’m a Norwegian writer with ties to the US, who grew up with various chronic illnesses. I discovered the reason for much of my trouble when I was diagnosed with endometriosis. Isolated and in pain, I have always turned to books. I craved seeing my life reflected. Since Please Read This Leaflet Carefully came out, I’ve heard from many readers. I hope that it can help people who haven’t seen themselves in art before. This list addresses the needs of a life with chronic illness and pain: guidance, darkness, humor, comfort, and poetry. I hope these books will help you as much as they did me.
I was absolutely stunned when I read "Unspeakable Conversations" by Harriet McBryde Johnson, one of the many brilliant pieces included in this reader. My edition is from 2010, but new and updated editions have come out since. It explores questions of interdependency and independence, gender, the body, sexuality, biases in science and medicine, and physical disabilities, and investigates issues around pain, mental disability, and invisible disabilities.
Becoming familiar with some disability theories has been invaluable to me. My capacity to read myself as disabled has grown and still fluctuates. To know that sharp minds have been working on this and that it isn’t only a private issue but a political and theoretical one, one that can be marked by joy and humor as well as grief, struggle, and hardship, is immensely helpful.
The fifth edition of The Disability Studies Reader addresses the post-identity theoretical landscape by emphasizing questions of interdependency and independence, the human-animal relationship, and issues around the construction or materiality of gender, the body, and sexuality. Selections explore the underlying biases of medical and scientific experiments and explode the binary of the sound and the diseased mind. The collection addresses physical disabilities, but as always investigates issues around pain, mental disability, and invisible disabilities as well. Featuring a new generation of scholars who are dealing with the most current issues, the fifth edition continues the Reader's tradition of remaining timely,…
I am a school psychologist and Christian who has lived with multiple debilitating chronic illnesses for 25 years. As a result, I am all too familiar with how disruptive and life-changing they can be to our daily lives. Yet few books exist that offer practical guidance for living with chronic illness. And even fewer of these books are for Christian readers. Written with different areas of expertise and angles, my book and the books below fill this gap. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have!
I was drawn to this meticulously written book in part because the author is a professor of pharmacy and my father is a retired pharmacist. I found myself thoroughly enjoying, underlining, and learning from the wealth of insight into living with chronic illness. The author offers excellent tips for navigating relationships, the medical field, and evaluating treatment options.
While this book (like mine) is written for readers of all faiths, I appreciated and related to the testimony in the final chapter in which the author discusses the importance of his Christian faith and how it has helped him find meaning and purpose through suffering.
How do you live well when the physical foundation of your life is crumbling? This is the challenge for millions who live with diseases for which there is no cure. These incurable ailments produce a life of constant pain, fatigue, numbness, dizziness, and other debilitating symptoms that create chronic suffering. Can you thrive in life while experiencing the suffering persistent sickness provokes? In When There Is No Cure, Dr. Craig Svensson guides readers to a path of thriving when life’s journey includes an incurable ailment. Drawing on his expertise as a pharmacist-scientist, as well as a fellow sufferer with several…
I am a school psychologist and Christian who has lived with multiple debilitating chronic illnesses for 25 years. As a result, I am all too familiar with how disruptive and life-changing they can be to our daily lives. Yet few books exist that offer practical guidance for living with chronic illness. And even fewer of these books are for Christian readers. Written with different areas of expertise and angles, my book and the books below fill this gap. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have!
As noted in the final chapter of my own book, laughing is something I need to do more. Chronic illness is debilitating as it can (and does) drain my energy and zap my mood. As part of the Sick and Tired series, I thoroughly enjoyedLaughter for the Sick and Tired as it is lighthearted, the humor is clean, the author is a great storyteller, and reading this resulted in several belly laughs.
Amazon Bestselling author Kimberly Rae, who lives with five annoying (and sometimes serious) health conditions, shares her medical mishaps and just plain weird experiences, such as:
*When her blood tests were lost at the hospital and she almost got treated for a random stranger’s liver problem. *When the doctor’s Central IV went up to her jugular instead of down, and he told her he’d fix it tomorrow! *Strange medical adventures from countries around the world.
Along with jokes, fun facts, and stories from other chronically ill friends, Laughter for the Sick & Tired may be just the dose of medicine…
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
As a woman who suffers from chronic illness, I am interested in sharing my experience and learning about other women who also suffer and survive their chronic conditions. I have had endometriosis, a painful disease, since I was a teenager. I’ve always enjoyed stories about different kinds of chronic illnesses, and I appreciate the way pain and sickness can be translated into memorable books.
O’Rourke blends personal anecdotes, meticulous research, and compelling conviction as she argues that how we treat chronic illness needs to change.
She unpacks the complex nature of autoimmune conditions offering the history of Western Medicine’s approach to illness and even shedding a light on why so many sick people are often left without definitive diagnoses or helpful treatment plans. This is a multi-dimensional portrait of autoimmune disease and chronic illness that I could not put down.
I am a school psychologist and Christian who has lived with multiple debilitating chronic illnesses for 25 years. As a result, I am all too familiar with how disruptive and life-changing they can be to our daily lives. Yet few books exist that offer practical guidance for living with chronic illness. And even fewer of these books are for Christian readers. Written with different areas of expertise and angles, my book and the books below fill this gap. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have!
As part of the Chronic Joy Thrive Series, President and Co-founder of Chronic Joy Ministry Cindee Snider Re offers a very useful book that consists of part devotional and part workbook. This is not a book to be simply read and passively absorbed; it is a book in which you will fill in the blanks on Bible verses, journal your thoughts, and answer reflection questions as they relate to your chronic illness and walk with Christ. Whether you use this alone or in a group setting, I found it comforting that Cindee walks alongside you, sharing experiences, scriptural insights, and pointing you to whom you can trust. No doubt this will strengthen your faith while dealing with the challenge of chronic illness.
Discovering Hope is a 10-chapter study inviting you to embrace a new perspective, celebrate the small victories, wrestle with difficult questions, and learn to laugh again. Often.No matter how dark the days, how wild the storm, how deep the valley or how long with winter, there is hope. There is always hope.
I have lived with chronic illness for over 12 years, and I’m a childhood cancer survivor. Because of this, I'm very passionate about those who live with chronic illness. I know the many aspects of chronic illness: grief, loss, feeling misunderstood, loneliness, and losing who you used to be. I want to be a beacon and voice for those who are living with chronic illness. As a chronic illness warrior, I have the privilege of being an authentic writer geared towards bringing hope, sharing my faith, encouragement, and validation to others who face chronic illness. I hope you enjoy reading the books from my list as much as I have!
I loved this book because it was written from a man's perspective of chronic illness, showing me what it looks like from the eyes of a man, husband, and father.
As I read through the pages, I felt his heart, faith, and emotions throughout every chapter. I enjoyed learning how he shared his faith with other patients, medical staff, and his social media following during his long-term stay at the hospital. I was left feeling inspired to continue to share my faith and encouragement with others.
It's hard not to feel overwhelmed when you're going through a protracted illness. The feelings in suffering can lead you to ask,
"Why, Lord, am I going through this crisis that has me battling low self-esteem due to my debilitating disease?"
"Why am I wrestling with loneliness? It seems no one cares."
"Why am I living with anxiety and depression? Will I be able to experience joy?"
Many people experience chronic illness or physical disability from which they may not be healed fully or at all. They may find it hard to stay upbeat while praying for healing, especially when…
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
I have lived with chronic illness for over 12 years, and I’m a childhood cancer survivor. Because of this, I'm very passionate about those who live with chronic illness. I know the many aspects of chronic illness: grief, loss, feeling misunderstood, loneliness, and losing who you used to be. I want to be a beacon and voice for those who are living with chronic illness. As a chronic illness warrior, I have the privilege of being an authentic writer geared towards bringing hope, sharing my faith, encouragement, and validation to others who face chronic illness. I hope you enjoy reading the books from my list as much as I have!
I felt so much validation and empathy in this book.
Loss and grief from chronic illness can be difficult and complicated to deal with. I learned in this book that not only is it okay to grieve and notice my losses, but that I can still find joy even in the trenches with chronic illness. I loved the thought-provoking questions that I feel helped me to draw closer in my walk with God because I was encouraged to be fully honest with God.
After reading this book, I was left with the perspective that grief may be a part of chronic illness, but there is joy to be found in God in the midst of it all.
Chronic pain, illness, and disability take so much away. Sometimes it seems as though they take everything we have ever loved and held dear. Our physical abilities and our jobs. Our current passions and future dreams. Our finances and our friends. Our sense of community and our ability to engage the world in ways we could before.
Chronic pain takes away our sense of self and who we always thought ourselves to be. How in the world are we supposed to deal with this fact?
In this book, I hope to teach you how to mourn your losses – everything…
