Books That Inspire the Host of the Nocturnists

Emily Silverman

The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso

Poet Sarah Manguso was in her usual state of health when one morning, she woke up and couldn’t feel her feet. This is a searing portrait of a young woman confronted with a mysterious autoimmune disease of the nerves: chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (CIDP). Her writing is minimalist and wry; it blazes with a truth so bright, you almost have to look away. This book taught me more about the harrowing experience of illness than any of my medical school lectures. Manguso brings us into the chaotic space of her sick body and gorgeously renders the small, intimate moments she shares with her doctors and nurses, whose levels of compassion and competence vary widely. In one standout scene, Manguso eats a plate of french fries during an apheresis session, and watches in real-time as the machine filters the fat particles out of her blood and into a waste-bag of plasma. This book is a masterpiece, and a must-read for all physicians.

AVA by Carole Maso

This book brought me to tears in the New Orleans airport. Don’t be scared off by the experimental prose: it goes down easy and quick. Maso writes in fragments, giving the work a rhythmic, musical feel. Each stanza washes over you like a wave on a beach. Gradually, a story begins to take shape, and we learn that the titular Ava is on her deathbed at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, sick with a rare blood cancer. The book chronicles her swirling thoughts over the course of a single day in her hospital room. She contemplates the small (food, love), the medium (politics, war), and the large (gravity, the cosmos), her meditations occasionally interrupted by visits from doctors, nurses, and phlebotomists. While some may be put off by Ava’s privileged background — she is a professor of comparative literature, and often makes references to high art, and previous sojourns to romantic European cities — the experience of watching her come to terms with her own mortality is cathartic and universal.

Coming Up For Air by George Orwell

“The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.” That’s the first sentence of this lesser-known 1939 novel from George Orwell, which I read while riding a BoltBus from Baltimore to New York City sometime in 2013. For some reason, I keep coming back to this book. I love its agile and lyrical prose, witty and self-denigrating narrator, and unique perspective on time, history, and nostalgia. Orwell’s depiction of women in this work is unforgiving and arguably sexist, but if you can put that aside, it's a beautiful and heartbreaking meditation on memory and modernity. Here’s your one liner: a middle-aged man in Britain is going about his daily life when — BOOM — a visual stimulus triggers a childhood memory. What follows is a cascade of vivid reminiscences, and then a decision to return to his geographic place of birth. What he finds there is unexpected.

The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu

This award-winning Chinese science fiction novel, set against the cultural backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, is positively terrifying, and I mean that in the best way. This is not a horror book. Rather, the terror I experienced while reading it had to do with its scope — the way it portrays the monstrousness of nature, and how it dwarfs humanity. The prose, translated from Chinese, can feel stilted at times, but no matter. Come for the sweeping, mind-expanding plot, and stay for the strong women characters. My favorite scenes in this book unfold in the abstract space of a mysterious video game. Fans of the classic Ender’s Game won’t be disappointed. Obama wasn’t either.

Emily Silverman, MD (@ESilvermanMD) is an internist at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and the creator and host of The Nocturnists, a live show and podcast where doctor share stories from the world of medicine.