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Reading path

The Sickbed

Illness, dying, the body. Tolstoy at Ivan Ilyich's bedside through three impossible days, Mann's sanatorium where Europe slowly catches the disease, Camus closing the gates of Oran, Septimus at the open window, Bauby blinking the alphabet of his last book. The literature most readers stay clear of, written by writers who refused to look away. Sontag at the end gives you the frame for everything you have just been put through.

In the app a path keeps your place, marks what you have read, and hands you the next work when you are ready for it.

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The first button needs the app on this device; the second gets it there.

The route

  • 1. A Journal Of The Plague YearDaniel Defoe, 1722
  • 2. The Death of Ivan IlyichLeo Tolstoy, 1886
  • 3. Death in VeniceThomas Mann, 1912
  • 4. The Magic MountainThomas Mann, 1924
  • 5. Mrs DallowayVirginia Woolf, 1925
  • 6. On Being IllVirginia Woolf, 1926
  • 7. As I Lay DyingWilliam Faulkner, 1930
  • 8. Pale Horse, Pale RiderKatherine Anne Porter, 1939
  • 9. The Death of VirgilHermann Broch, 1945
  • 10. Doctor FaustusThomas Mann, 1947
  • 11. The PlagueAlbert Camus, 1947
  • 12. A Very Easy DeathSimone de Beauvoir, 1964
  • 13. Cancer WardAleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1968
  • 14. Illness as MetaphorSusan Sontag, 1978
  • 15. The Diving Bell and the ButterflyJean-Dominique Bauby, 1997
  • 16. The Year of Magical ThinkingJoan Didion, 2005
  • 17. Johnny Got His GunDalton Trumbo, 1939
  • 18. By Night in ChileRoberto Bolaño, 2000
  • 19. PhiloctetesSophocles, 409 BCE
  • 20. Letters of John Keats to Fanny BrawneJohn Keats, 1878
  • 21. MarsFritz Zorn, 1977
  • 22. The Masque of the Red DeathEdgar Allan Poe, 1842