100 books like Dying to Do Letterman

Singlehandedly one of the greatest fictional books about war, Tim finds clever ways of imbuing readers with captivating characters.

Each short story gives insight into a war still misunderstood to this day.

As a veteran, I identify with the curious war stories and the unique character attributes displayed throughout them.

While cynical and the fictitious content questioned, The Things They Carried carries the weight of war and its lasting effects. 

This slim book is a game changer. I have had my copy of Stephen Pressfield's classic for well over a decade. This book has helped me multiple times to break through my inner resistance, and it's proven to be a go-to resource for me when I feel inspired to create something big and new and then find I get bogged down with self-doubt and procrastination.

Pressfield calls it "resistance," and it's much more common than most realize. In this book, he shares his ups and down cycles of creative endeavors. He gives guidance on how to break through the inevitable resistance that we all care about when we are standing at the base of the mountain of a creative project and struggling with our inner battles of self-sabotage, self-doubt, overwhelm, fears, and the interference of outside distractions and influences.

One of the strategies he offers is called "turning pro"; he… show more.

Reading this novel as a junior doctor was like eating chocolate-coated, barbed wire. I was shocked, appalled, and outraged. I laughed. I cried. I wanted to stop and throw it away across the room. And yet, I remember it decades later. A book I will never forget.

Since then, there have been blogs and websites and many more recent similar stories of life as a recent graduate, but this one covers the same message that I needed so much. It is about caring as much as diagnosis. Being a doctor means relating to people first and illness second.

I know John Patrick McAfee from art shows where the ‘art husband’ helped his wife set up and present her work. I came to understand him better after completing a year of research on the US Army Special Forces, while creating a drawing honoring the Green Berets.

Slow Walk In a Sad Rain has been described elsewhere as the Catch-22 of the Vietnam War. The story more than lives up to the comparison. McAfee’s wry, tragic humor represents an authentic slice of the life he lived as a Special Forces medic; how he was able to move on from that experience and remain an affable, productive individual capable of sharing his multiple gifts is the greatest mystery, and a testimony to every man and woman who survived the ordeal. 

I started this book because I liked the drawing style. Within the first 3 pages, I couldn’t put the book down. It’s not just Jennifer Hayden’s illustration skills or the freshness of her lines and patterns and mark-making and the way each panel is a masterpiece in itself, it’s the story that pulled me in. This is a book about life and love and family, told with humor, insight, and intelligence. In Jennifer Hayden’s words, the book is “a dramatic comedy sewn together from real events and real emotions,” but that doesn’t begin to convey the richness and depth of this narrative journey and the quirky sarcastic honest way it tells it like it is. The story still resonates long after I finished reading it.

This is a scholarly memoir by a co-author of The Madwoman in the Attic, the feminist literary classic, and a professor of English and women’s studies at Indiana University. She was diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer in 2008, then a virtual death sentence. Gubar describes several stages of treatment including "debulking" and chemotherapy and the importance of a loving support system. The writing is sober, well-documented, comprehensive, and, though published ten years ago, all too relevant.

Hitchens was a man on a mission with a razor sharp intellect. These precious words written while Hitchens was losing a fatal battle with cancer are fascinating and he touches on some profound ideas. I was especially struck by the conviction of a man who was a staunch atheist unflinchingly prepared for a godless death. Hitchens was not only witty, but inspirational and courageous.

I found The Undying Project beautiful and bracing. Like me, the author of this book had breast cancer. Unlike me, she had an aggressive cancer that is difficult to treat and often deadly. Her fear and struggle get transformed into blocks of prose that loosely tell the story of her treatment, but also discuss more philosophical writing on suffering and its meanings. At times I found the book hard to take, but I am so glad I read it because it gave cancer a personal and intellectual context; I hadn’t realized I needed that. The Undying won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020. 

Imagine being a medical school student in the best of health and full of spirit and ambition, and suddenly being engulfed by a strange and mysterious illness that even the best of doctors in the most renowned hospitals are unable to appropriately diagnose, let alone treat. This chilling story of a doctor who literally chases his own cure is a great example of the much-needed patient advocacy that may often be required to diagnose and treat rare and complex conditions effectively. The author’s passion for finding the underlying cause of his disease (Castleman’s disease) and experimenting with innovative unlikely combinations of drug therapies makes his story memorable and truly inspiring.

This classic text by medical sociologist Arthur Frank was written in the wake of two life-threatening events: a heart attack at age 39 and a cancer diagnosis a year later. 

Frank draws on both his scholarly and personal experiences to guide others who find themselves in similar circumstances. He helps us understand that when we place ourselves in medicine’s hands, we also subject ourselves to their ways of knowing. Their stories bleed into our stories, but they are never the same as our stories because what medicine knows as disease is not the same as what we experience as illness. 

Thus, Frank teaches us: “These two stories, the story of medicine taking the body as its territory and the story of learning to wonder at the body itself, can only be told together, because illness is both stories at once.”