Walker Percy Society

Reading Recommendations

Authors who are P&S Medical Students or P&S Graduates

• Walker Percy (P&S 1941)
  • For a listing of books by Walker Percy, visit http://www.bestwebbuys.com/Walker_Percy-mcid_2118056.html?isrc=b-authorsearch
• Robin Cook (P&S 1966)
  • For a listing of books by Robin Cook, visit http://www.bestwebbuys.com/Robin_Cook-mcid_2153123.html?isrc=b-authorsearch
• Beasts of No Nation: A Novel by Uzodinma Iweala (P&S 2011)
• You're Too Wonderful to Die by Andrew Bomback (P&S 2003)

Authors Highly Recommended

• Gustave Flaubert
• Italo Calvino
• John Coetzee 
• James Joyce
• Vladimir Nabokov
• Toni Morrison
• David Sedaris
• Audre Lorde's 'Cancer Journals', which is a beautiful work written by a poet (who grew up in Washington Heights no less) about her experience with cancer.

Books Highly Recommended by Medical Students

• A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Levitt & Dubner
• Suite Française by Irene Nemirovsky
• The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
• White Noise by Don DeLillo
• Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor by Paul Farmer
• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Earnest Hemingway
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc  
• Complications by Atul Gawande
• The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
• The Merry-go-round by Ruth Heller
• Snow Falling on Cedars by  David Guterson
• Mason and Dixon by Pynchon
• Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
• Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
• Hiroshima by John Hersey
• The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
• How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Kundera 
• Civilwarland in Bad Decline by George Saunders
• A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis  
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
• The Exact Location of the Soul by Richard Selzer
• White Teeth by Zadie Smith
• Ghost Saturday by Anil
• One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Midnight's Children, Shalimar the Clown, or Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
• Blindness by Jose Saramago
• The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck
• Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or What is the What by Dave Eggers
• Notes from Underground or Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• The Quiet American by Graham Green
• For Love of Insects by Thomas Eisner
• Life on a Little-Known Planet by Howard Evans
• Monkey Wrench Game or Brave Cowboy by Edward Abbey
• Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• In My Father's House by Ernest Gaines
• Development as Freedom by Amartya Kumar Sen
• The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
• The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
• Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel
• 1984 by George Orwell
• Mrs.Dalloway or To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
• Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje
• Snow by Orhan Pamuk
• Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
• The Emigrants by Sebald & Hulse
• Dead Souls or Short Stories by Nikolai Gogol
• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
• Slaughterhouse Five or Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
• Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
• Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• Portnoy's Complaint or American Pastoral by Philip Roth 
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Just about My Head by James Baldwin