Literature & Medicine Past Reading Lists
2006
- Book: Enduring Grace by Carol Lee Flinders
- Books: The Black Swan by Thomas Mann and The Black Swan by Richard Selzer
- Book: On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf
- Video: The Fire Within: a Video Documentary about M C Richards, Teacher, Poet, and Ceramicist
- Book: Elizabeth Costello, by J.M. Coetzee
- Book: The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy
- Book: Great Short Works by Herman Melville
- Book: Tell Me a Riddle, by Tillie Olsen
- Book: Democratic Vistas, Walt Whitman
- Book: My Antonia, Willa Cather
- Play: Proof by David Auburn available as a book and on DVD
- Book: Confessions of an Innocent Man: Torture and Survival in a Saudi Prison, by William Sampson
- Poems: New Poetry by Ken Brewer
- Book: Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion
- Book: Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Book: Vigil, by Alan Shapiro
- Book: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon
2005
- Poems: Selected works of Emily Dickinson
- Book: Turn of the Screw by Henry James
- Book: The Awakening by Kate Chopin
- Book: The Answers are in the Mountains by William Stafford
- Book: The Blessing by Gregory Orr
- Book: The Book of Job by Raymond Scheindlin
- Poetry: "Saying the World" by Peter Pereira, M.D. & "The Uses of Imperfection" by Ted McMahon, M.D.
- Film: Talk to Her by Pedro Almodovar
- Book: What We Talk about When We Talk about Love by Raymond Carver
- Book: Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag
- Book: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacob
- Film: Vera Drake
- Book: Blessing the Boats by Lucille Clifton
- Reading: Sum of Accidents by Ken Brewer
- Book: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- Documentary: Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter by Deborah Hoffman
- Book: Saturday by Ian McEwan
2004
- Book: The Plague by Albert Camus
- Poetry: The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag Of Poetry by Rafael Campo
- Poetry: The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay edited by Nancy Milford (Modern Library Edition)
- Poems: By Children Organ Transplant Patients
- Book: Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas by Elaine Pagels
- Reading: Selection from Specimen Days by Walt Whitman (e-text available)
- Book: From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practices by Jodi Halpern
- Short Story: The Lame Shall Enter First by Flannery O'Connor
- Short Stories: By Flannery O'Connor
- Book: Between the Heartbeats: Poetry and Prose by Nurses (edited by Cortney Davis & Judy Schaefer)
- Selections from: Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
- Book: Mortal Lessons: Notes on the A
- Short Story: "People Like That are the Only People Here" from Birds of America: Stories by Lorrie Moore, Part of Surgery by Richard Selzer
- Play: Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov
- Book: Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled by Nancy Mairs
- Reading: Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
- Reading: The Answers Are in The Mountain by William Stafford
2003
- Book: The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
- Play: Copenhagen by Michael Frayn
- Book: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
- Book: The River Midnight by Lilian Nattel
- Book: Blindness by Jose Saramago
- Book: Waiting by Ha Jin
- Book: The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall
- Novella: Billy Budd by Herman Melville
- Book: Excerpts from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche
- Reading: "The Apology" from Great Dialogues of Plato translated by W.H.D. Rouse
- Book: Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande
- Book: Atonement by Ian McEwan
- Book: Selections from Remembrances of Things Past by Marcel Proust (Vol I, Combrey pp. 52-145)
- Poetry: May Out West by May Swenson
- Book: Pushkin's Children: Writings on Russia and Russians by Tatyana Tolstaya, translated by Jamey Gambrell
2002
- Book: The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
- Short Stories: "Borders" by Thomas King, and "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver
- Book: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Book: Eugene Onegin by Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
- Book: Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers
- Book: A Country Doctor by Sarah Orne Jewett
- Play: Galileo by Bertolt Brecht
- Book: A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
- Book: Selections from Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
- Book: Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Andrew Hurley, Penguin)
- Book: Regeneration by Pat Barker
- Reading: A Mastectomy by Fanny Burney
2001
- Book: East of the Mountains, by David Guterson
- Play: A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt
- Reading: Master and Margarita by M. Bulgakov
- Book: "Remembrance of Things Past," from Guermantes Way by Scott Moncrieff
- Book: The Case of Dr. Sachs by Martin Winkler
- Book: Mormon Country by Wallace Stegner
- Book: A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean
- Book: Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee
- Book: Morality Play, by Barry Unsworth
- Book: Pictures from Brueghel by William Carlos Williams
- Short Stories: "Defender of the Faith," by Phillip Roth and "A Jury of Her Peers," by Susan Glaspell
- Book: The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell
2000
- Play: Macbeth by William Shakespeare
- Reading: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson by Thomas Johnson
- Play: Eumenides (the third play by Oresteia) by Aeschylus
- Book: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
- Book: The Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens
- Book: The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- Reading: Selections from Articulations: The Body and Illness in Poetry by Jon Mukand
- Book: Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros
- Book: The Scalpel and the Silver Bear: The First Navajo Woman Surgeon Combines Western Medicine and Traditional Healing by Arviso Alvord, M.D.
- Play: Hamlet by William Shakespeare
- Reading: You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories by Alice Walker
- Play: WIT by Margaret Edson
- Play: Beyond the Four Corners of the World: A Navajo Woman's Journey by Emily Benedek
- Reading: Blind Eye: How the Medical Profession Let a Doctor Get Away with Murder by James B. Steward
- Book: The Smell of Matches by John Stone
- Play: King Lear by William Shakespeare
1999
- Book: So Far From God by Ana Castillo
- Book: The Kangaroo Notebook by Kobo Abe
- Book: Illness and Culture in a Postmodern World by David Morris
- Book: The Tennis Partner by Abraham Verghese
- Play: Richard III by William Shakespeare
- Book: The Fatigue Artist by Lynn Sharon Schwartz
- Book: Operation Wandering Soul by Richard Powers
- Book: The Book of Job, Philoctetes by Sophocles
- Book: The Death of Ivan Illych by Tolstoy, The Metamorphosis by Kafka
- Book: A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing by Reynolds Price
- Reading: Selected Poems "The Normal Heart," by Larry Kramer; "Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog," by Paul Monette
- Book: The Least of These My Brethren: A Doctor's Story of Hope and Miracles on an Inner-City AIDS Ward by Daniel J. Baxter
- Reading: Selected Stories - The Good Doctor, by Susan Onthank Mates
1998
- Reading: "On Experience," from Michel de Montaigne Essays
- Book: Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
- Book: My Own Country by Abraham Verghese
- Book: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Ann Fadiman
- Book: Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
- Book: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
- Book: Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors by Susan Sontag
- Reading: "Tristan" and Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
- Book: The Plague by Albert Camus
- Book: Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- Book: Borrowed Time by Paul Monette
- Book: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
1997
- Book: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Play: Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
- Book: Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- Book: The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
- Book: Medical Ethics in the Renaissance by Winfried Schleiner
- Book: Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
- Book: Walden by Thoreau
- Book: The Song of Songs from the Bible
- Reading: Poetry by William Blake
- Book: Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey
- Book: Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
- Book: The Father, poetry by Sharon Olds
1996
- Book: Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- Book: Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov
- Book: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- Reading: Selected Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Book: A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by A.Solzhenitsyn
- Reading: "Enemies" by Anton Chekhov and "Toenails" by Richard Selzer
- Book: Persuasion by Jane Austen
- Play: The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare
- Reading: Poems by Emily Dickenson
- Book: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- Book: We by Eugene Zamyatin
- Reading: Selected poems by Miroslav Holub
- Reading: Selected Short Stories by women authors
1995
- Book: Unredeemed Captive by John Demos
- Book: Essays: A Selection: On Repenting, On Experience, On Some Lines of Virgil, by Michel de Montaigne
- Book: Remembering Babylon by David Maloof
- Book: Infinite Plan by Isabel Allende
- Book:A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
- Book: The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
- Book: The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
- Book: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
- Book: A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
- Book: Dispatches by Michael Herr
- Reading: Selected poems about the medical profession
- Book: Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams
1994
- Book: The Backslider and "Trinity" by Levi Peterson
- Book: The Book of Job, "The Grand Inquisitor" by Fyodor Dostoevski
- Book: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
- Video: Lorenzo's Oil
- Play: Hamlet by William Shakespeare
- Book: Passage to India by E.M. Forster
- Reading: "Jacob and Esau" and "Joseph and his Brothers"
- Book: Old Times on the Mississippi by Mark Twain
- Reading: Selections: Homer, Virgil, W.H. Auden
- Book: Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez
- Play: Coriolanus by William Shakespeare
1993
- Videos:A Midnight Clear, Paths of Glory
- Book: The Cocktail Party by T.S. Eliot, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee
- Book: North of Hope by Jon Hassler
- Video: Dad
- Book: Cheap in August by Graham Greene, Dr. Heidegger's Experiment by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Video: Mash, "Civil Disobedience" by Henry David Thoreau
- Book: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Book: Spence and Lila by Bobbie Ann Mason
- Video or book: Fried Green Tomatoes by Fannie Flagg
- Book: Sophie's Choice by William Styron, "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson
- Book: Artic Dreams by Barry Lopez
1992
- Reading: Four poems and a short story by Willa Cather.
- Book: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Book: A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving.
- Book: Our Town by Thornton Wilder.
- Play: King Lear by William Shakespeare
- Book: The Awakening by Kate Chopin.
- Play: The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
- Play: Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
- Play: Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare
- Reading: 3 Short Stories by William Carlos Williams, Ernest Hemingway, and John Updike
- Book: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, The Death of Ivan Illych by Leo Tolstoy
