Every year I find more and more book lists; best books, most popular best selling, books recommended by a celebrity or other famous person, etc. I can’t possibly read them all, but some of them sound so interesting I wish I could.
In this post I’m listing some of the book lists I have found; these are all medical/health related books, which I tend to interpret loosely.
If you read one and like it, send me a brief note about it and I’ll share with my other readers.
(These are affiliate links to sites where you can buy something, and send a commission to this blog, to pay expenses and to donate to health related causes throughout the world.)
Click on each title or picture to read an Amazon review .

First, here is a new book I did read last year. Although published in 2020, the author wrote it in 2019, not realizing how timely it would be.
The Orphan Collector
A Heroic Novel of Survival During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic
In this well researched novel about the influenza pandemic of 100 years ago, Ms. Wiseman takes us into the heartbreak of the thousands of children orphaned by both the pandemic and the world war.
I started reading the book late in the year, by the time the COVID-19 cases and deaths were surging in number. I thought about all the people being left orphaned now, although they are not all children. Some are middle-aged adults losing their elderly parents, while others are older adults losing their young adult children.
(As of January 25, 2021, in the United States 25 million persons have been infected with COVID-19, and 420,000 have died.)
Whatever one’s age, losing loved ones to an out of control disease is heartbreaking. The Orphan Collector does not have a fairytale “happy ending”. But the main character Pia, a 12 year old immigrant girl in Philadelphia, learns an ending different than one hoped for can be satisfying in unexpected ways.
Best Books from Amazon
Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
Best Books from People Magazine
Hidden Valley Road
Inside the Mind of an American Family
Hamnet
Penny who blogs at grownchildren.net wrote this about Hamnet
The author paints a detailed portrait of Shakespeare’s wife as an herbalist; …he grows and culls her herbs for various ailments and dispenses them as a pharmacist today would do.
But the story is about grief and how the Shakespeares, man and wife, separately worked their way through the immense loss of their son. The portrait of her grief–we don’t learn much about his–is thrilling in its sensitivity. You don’t have to be in the medical or health field to be fascinated by this book.
What Are You Going Through
Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir
New from Tyndale
The Anxiety Reset
A Life-Changing Approach to Overcoming Fear, Stress, Worry, Panic Attacks, OCD and More
exploring the HEART of health in literature
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More recommendations from Smithsonian Magazine.com
The Ten Best Children’s Books of 2020
These top titles deliver history lessons, wordplay and a musical romp through the animal kingdom
The Ten Best Science Books of 2020
New titles explore the mysterious lives of eels, the science of fear and our connections to the stars