Here are 100 books that Laughter for the Sick and Tired fans have personally recommended if you like
Laughter for the Sick and Tired.
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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!
Licensed Counselor Esther Smith masterfully offers an impressive Christian devotional for chronic illness sufferers that takes only a few minutes per day to read. I find myself referring back to it for strength, wisdom, and biblical insights. The chapter for each day includes a Bible verse pertaining to a topic, a faith-based discussion, reflection questions, and suggested actions.
There is so much to love about this book: it is practical, relatable, quick and easy to read, and comforting.
Is chronic illness taking over your heart as much as your body? Physical symptoms and limitations change all aspects of life, leading to losses and to unique challenges that are difficult to navigate. Writing from her own experience with these issues, Esther Smith focuses heavily on encouragement and practical application, showing you how to release guilt and shame, ask for help, balance work and rest, and get through days of difficult symptoms. Each day, you will be encouraged as you consider how God uses illness in sanctifying, kingdom-advancing ways to display his glory and work in your heart.
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 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!
Being a “glass is half-full” person myself, I enjoy reading inspiring, actionable books that encourage me to look on the bright side and stretch myself to be the best version of myself.
In Determined, multiple sclerosis sufferer Mark Fry provides a direct, no-nonsense, forward-looking, Christian approach to living well with a chronic illness. In each chapter, Fry offers a Bible verse with sage advice such as smile; do things for others to take the focus off yourself and become happier in the process; and use your illness as a means to rely on and glorify God. I also enjoyed the 21-day devotional at the end of the book.
Fry, a Nashville native, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis over 20 years ago and used his experiences living with a chronic illness to write "Determined." In the book, Fry incorporates his Christian faith to offer biblically-based encouragement and a roadmap for others to help them live life with a more positive outlook. It provides suggestions, reassurance and inspiration for those looking for answers post-diagnosis and how to live a more positive and encouraging life for God in the face of their new challenge. The book also has a bonus section with devotionals and links to encouraging songs that will help…
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.
How to Be Sick is a soothing and strengthening book that offers tools that are useful for any creature living a life with a human body and heart. It contains many Buddhist-inspired mindfulness techniques that I use daily, such as ways to adjust one’s thoughts and approach, ways to work with acceptance and grief, and ways to find pleasure and joy when they are hard to come by.
A brand-new edition of the best-selling classic with added and updated practices.
In 2001, Toni Bernhard got sick and, to her and her partner’s bewilderment, stayed that way. As they faced the confusion, frustration, and despair of a life with sudden limitations—a life that was vastly different from the one they’d thought they’d have together—Toni had to learn how to be sick. In spite of her many physical and energetic restrictions (and sometimes, because of them), Toni learned how to live a life of equanimity, compassion, and joy. This book reminds us that our own inner freedom is limitless, regardless…
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.
Outdoors has always been a nourishing place for me, even when I edged into risky or dangerous places, especially solo. When I got rid of my car (for financial reasons), I found my options to reach outdoor adventures limited. Soon after, I began working in transportation, tourism, and recreation and sought ways for everyone to access outdoor recreational opportunities, regardless of their abilities or any limiting barriers. Slow travel is broadly inclusive, enabling anyone to benefit from outdoor experiences and their transformative potential. Slow travel helped me feel less alone, more connected, more balanced emotionally, healthier physically, and more creative; it revealed the path to Love.
Before reading this book, I thought the most inclusive version of the slow travel principle of micro-travel and mindfulness was going outside and experiencing the weather. But because of a mysterious illness that left her bedridden, Bailey could not go outside nor look out the window. Yet, she wrote about the habits and hijinks of a tiny snail a friend brought her in a pot of violets.
I loved that Bailey found snail “bites” on paper and then explained how a snail’s mouth works and why the hole in the paper was square-shaped. The snail becomes Bailey’s connection to the outdoors (or wildness), where she finds hope and agency. My lesson: a terrarium can be as (or more) therapeutic to someone’s spirit as walking Spain’s Camino de Santiago.
While an illness keeps her bedridden, Elisabeth Bailey watches a wild snail that has taken up residence in a terrarium alongside her bed. She enters the rhythm of life of this mysterious creature, and comes to a greater understanding of her own confined place in the world. In a work that beautifully demonstrates the rewards of closely observing nature, she shares the inspiring and intimate story of her close encounter with Neohelix albolabris - a common woodland snail.
Intrigued by the snail's world - from its strange anatomy to its mysterious courtship activities - she becomes a fascinated and amused…
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.
Huber is an author and teacher whom I adore, and I am lucky enough to call friend and mentor, but her writing will make everyone fall in love with her.
Heartfelt, lyrical, brutally honest, and funny, this collection of essays will give you new insight into what it means to live in chronic pain. She writes in a way that makes illness and pain itself almost beautiful. If you want poetic writing, a compelling narrative, and an experimental approach to understanding the pain that is an inextricable part of life for some of us, this book is for you.
Rate your pain on a scale of one to ten. What about on a scale of spicy to citrus? Is it more like a lava lamp or a mosaic? Pain, though a universal element of human experience, is dimly understood and sometimes barely managed. Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System is a collection of literary and experimental essays about living with chronic pain. Sonya Huber moves away from a linear narrative to step through the doorway into pain itself, into that strange, unbounded reality. Although the essays are personal in nature, this collection is…
I’ve been fascinated with the science and psychology behind sugar addiction ever since I started graduate school at Princeton University. When I was deciding what to study for my dissertation. I knew my topic needed to be something big, important, and meaningful. At the time, we were starting to hear about the dangers of obesity, and I wondered if it was due to our changing food environment, which had more and more sugar in it. I never would have imagined that this project would lead me to over 20 years of research. Learn all about it in my book Sugarless.
The reason why I absolutely love this book is because he does not hold back in sharing the unfiltered truth behind processed foods and how they are destroying our health. I especially love how effortlessly Dr. Lustig draws readers in by being direct, concise, and sharing some personal experiences along the way.
Did you know that 62% of the food in our supermarkets is not only processed but 'ultra-processed' (ingredients from other foods are combined to make something 'new', often in colours that do not exist in nature) and that data shows that by eating this kind of food over time we are literally slowly poisoning ourselves?
In the hard-hitting, ground-breaking tradition of his NY Times bestseller FAT CHANCE, which revealed the dangers of sugar, Dr Robert Lustig persuasively presents a stark expose of how our addiction to processed foods (aided and abetted by the food industry, big ag, big pharma, institutional…
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…
