Book Club

[Ioreth, ADN, RN]

Like many other pre-nursing students, right now I am waiting. I have completed all the necessary prerequisites for the programs to which I am applying. I have taken the entrance exams. I have submitted my applications. Now I have a minimum of 2 months to wait to find out whether I have been selected to start nursing school in the fall and I have way too much time on my hands.

Of course, I'm enjoying the respite from school while I spend time with my family and catch up on long-neglected household chores. Still, I am left with entirely too much time to sit around and wonder "what if" and whether or not I have any idea of what I am getting myself into. Since I love to read, I've been voraciously consuming books on nursing, medicine, disease, anatomy, history, and related subjects from my local library.

I have compiled a list of some of the books I have enjoyed reading or plan to read in no particular order. I hope that this list will be of use to other students who are very busy anxiously waiting. What books have you enjoyed that I have missed? Please reply with your favorites!

• The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives by Theresa Brown
  
• Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between by Theresa Brown
  
• The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital by Alexandra Robbins
  
• What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear by Danielle Ofri
  
• I Wasn't Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse by Lee Gutkind
  
• Becoming Nursey: From Code Blues to Code Browns, How to Care for Your Patients and Yourself by Kati L. Kleber
  
• First Year Nurse: Wisdom, Warnings, and What I Wish I'd Known My First 100 Days on the Job by Barbara Arnoldussen
  
• A Nurse's Story by Tilda Shalof
  
• Beautiful Unbroken: One Nurse's Life by Mary Jane Nealon
  
• Notes on Nursing by Florence Nightingale
  
• Florence Nightingale: The Courageous Life of the Legendary Nurse by Catherine Reef
  
• The Secret Rescue: An Untold Story of American Nurses and Medics Behind Nazi Lines by Cate Lineberry
  
• We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of the American Women Trapped on Bataan by Elizabeth Norman
  
• And If I Perish: Frontline U.S. Army Nurses in World War II by Evelyn Monahan
  
• I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong
  
• The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee
  
• The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
  
• The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande
  
• Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande
  
• Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande
  
• Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure by Paul Offit
  
• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
  
• Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande
  
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
  
• When Breath Becomes Air Hardcover by Paul Kalanithi
  
• My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor
  
• The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman
  

[ItsThatJenGirl, CNA]

I really liked this one:

I Wasn't Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse by Lee Gutkind

[Here.I.Stand, BSN, RN]

I just bought the Audible version of "We Band of Angels." I've been on a survival story kick anyway -- my recent reads have included Endurance (Shackleton's would-be trans-Antarctic expedition), Ghosts of Cape Sabine (the Greely expedition), Desperate Passage (the Donner party), and In the Heart of the Sea (the whaleship Essex wreck). I can't wait for this one!

[Zyprexa]

Call the Midwife series by Jennifer Worth

I highly recommend all four books:

Call the Midwife

Farewell to East End

Shadows of the Workhouse

In the Midst of Life