At the beginning I found myself wanting to read especially the books on Shelf A. I wanted facts, information about my disease and its history, about the medicines I might take, the surgeries I might be eligible for, the long-term prognosis, the likelihood of a cure. As I read the books on Shelf A, however, I sometimes found myself feeling like I was all body, no spirit. I sometimes felt that I was being talked down to by people who sometimes seemed to be more interested in my disease than in me. After that, I found myself drawn to the books on Shelf B, books written by people with my disease. I wanted to hear from people like me who knew what it felt like to have Parkinson's, who had experienced first-hand the confusion and the terror that comes with the diagnosis. I wanted not so much scientific facts by supposedly dispassionate doctors and other professionals, but information and advice from other people who had walked in my trembling footsteps and stumbling shoes. And then I found myself picking up the novels on Shelf C.

These were books that told a story, often an exciting story, about people who had Parkinson's. I found that the Shelf C books were particularly useful in portraying two kinds of nasty reality that the writers of both Shelf A and Shelf B tended to shy away from. One of these was the stresses that Parkinson's visits on families of men and women with Parkinson's. The other was how people in the later stages of the disease live and how they die.