No matter how well you read, you can read more efficiently.  Start today. Improving your reading skills is a long term commitment requiring years of effort.  You can read better but it will take time. Read anything and everything.

This will increase your reading speed and vocabulary (necessary for performing well on entrance exams) and will increase your breadth of knowledge (necessary for successful interviews).

The New York Times is recommended as material written at the reading difficulty level of the MCAT exam.  Scientific American is at a similar level of difficulty.  Both are available locally at the Leigh Mall bookstore.  The Sunday New York Times is also available every week at Kroger on Highway 45 N.  Both are available in Fant Library.   Make it a habit to read these publications regularly.

There are a variety of books available in the MUW library, the Columbus Public Library, local bookstores, and Amazon.com.  Since you are obviously interested in health professions, we make the following recommendations according to your taste:

•  MEDICAL SCHOOL MEMOIRS

• Konner Melvin describes the trials and tribulations of an American medical education in Becoming a Doctor:  A Journey of Initiation in Medical School.
• Perri Klass writes both fiction and non-fiction.  She chronicles her experiences as medical student, intern, and resident in two books:  A Not Entirely Benign Procedure:  Four Years as a Medical Student and Baby Doctor.  Her novel, Other Women's Children, relates the personal side of Dr. Amelia Stern's commitment to medicine.
• Robert Marion shares his (and his colleagues') personal and paradoxical encounters with the American medical education system.  Learning to Play God:  The Coming of Age of a Young Doctor relates 20 gripping stories illustrating forces which transform idealistic first year med students into competent yet insensitive third year interns.  The Intern Blues:  The Private Ordeals of Three Young Doctors peeks into the diaries of three pediatric interns confronting very sick children, the impact of AIDS epidemic, and hospital red tape.  The Boy Who Felt No Pain:  Tales from the Pediatric Ward consists of several stories chronicling a doctor's reconciliation of his personal beliefs, hospital administration, and patient family concerns.
• Life After Medical School:  Thirty-two Doctors Describe How They Shaped Their Medical Careers by Leonard Laster.
• David Hilfiker wrote Not All of Us Are Saints:  A Doctor's Journey with the Poor.
• On Doctoring:  Stories, Poems, Essays edited by Richard Reynolds and John Stone.
• Albert Schweitzer wrote Out of My Life and Thought.
• The Call of Service by Robert Coles.

• MYSTERIES

• Patricia Daniels Cornwell has created medical examiner Kay Scarpetta to solve a variety of crimes in several excellent books which include:  The Body Farm, All That Remains, Post Mortem, Body of Evidence, and Cruel and Unusual.
• Ronald Querry weaves an interesting tale of Native American mysticism and Western medicine in Bad Medicine.

• MUSINGS, HISTORIES, AND WONDERFUL STORIES OF FACT

• Oliver Sacks, a psychiatrist by training, writes elegantly about a wide range of intriguing topics.  His books of musings and essays include:  An Anthropologist on Mars:  Seven Paradoxical Tales, Awakenings, A Leg to Stand On, Migraine, Island of the Colorblind, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
• Richard Rhodes chronicles the discovery and investigation of prions (the only infectious agents known to consist only of protein and which cause mad cow disease and Kreutzfeld-Jakob disease) in Deadly Feasts.  Its truly a page turner.
• Michael Brown and William Maples team up to tell Dr. Maples' unusual tales from the crypt:  Dead Men Do Tell Tales:  The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Pathologist.
• Harold Morowitz wrote TheThermodynamicsof Pizza containing 52 essays which run the gamut from reflections on the bagel, olives and pizza to a discussion of Thoreau's knowledge of the natural sciences and a comparison of the sailing voyages of Christopher Columbus."  His Entropy and the Magic Flute is described by Amazon.com as "an appealing mix of brief reflections on everything from litmus paper to the hippopotamus--from the acclaimed author of Mayonnaise and the Origin of Life. Here are over 40 light, graceful essays in which one of our wisest experimental biologists comments on issues of science, technology, society, philosophy, and the arts.
• Stephen J. Gould explores the bizarre idea and history of IQ in The Mismeasure of Man.
• William Carlos William was not only a great American poet but a physician, as well.  Read his Doctor Stories.
• It's Always Something is a memoir of Gilda Radner's (SNL comic) encounter with the American medical system in her fight against cancer.
• John McPhee's factual essays are always interesting and informative.  Try reading his Heirs of General Practice.
• Michael Crichton (of ER, Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain fame) also wrote Five Patients:  The Hospital Explained.
• Joycelyn Elders, MD:  From Sharecropper's Daughter to Surgeon General of the USA by Joycelyn Elders.
• First, Do No Harm by Lisa Belkin.
• Letters to a Young Doctor by Richard Selzer.
• Stories of Sickness by Howard Brody.

• NOVELS

• Richard Powers weaves a historical tale of the deciphering of the genetic code, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bach's keyboard pieces in The Gold Bug Variations.
• Samuel Shem's first novel, House of God, was branded a "hilarious novel of the healing arts that reveals everything your doctor never wanted you to know."  The follow up novel, Mount Misery, has been described as "ER goes psycho."   You get the picture -- humor jabbing at the foibles and shortcomings of the medical establishment.
• Simon Mawer's novel, Mendel's Dwarf, would provide the perfect screenplay if director David Lynch (Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) decided to make a movie about classical genetics.
• George Eliot's novel Middlemarch you may recall from English class.

• MEDICAL ISSUES

• Caring for Patients from Different Cultures:  Case Studeis from American Hospitals by Geri-Ann Galanti.
• Classic Cases in Medical Ethics:  Accounts of Cases that Have Shaped Medical Ethics with Philosophical, Legal, and Historical Background by Gregory E. Pence.
• Health Care Systems Around the World:  Characteristics, Issues, Reforms by Marie Lassey, William Lassey, and Martin Jinks.
• The Corporate Transformation of Health Care:  Perspectives and Implications edited by J. Warren Salmon.
• The Social Transformation of American Medicine by Paul Starr.

Have you read a book you think others in AED might find interesting?  Send the title and your brief synopsis or review to: dcarson@muw.edu .  I'll post your recommendations to this list.