I Survived Cancer, but Never Won the Tour de France (Hawk Publishing, 2006) is author Jim Chastain's memoir about his battle with a rare cancer in his arm, a sarcoma that required five surgeries and recurred three times in three years. The book is more than your typical cancer survivor’s story. It focuses on the humorous and poignant moments along Jim’s turbulent journey, the “wow” moments with widespread narrative and emotional appeal. Overall, the book is about the search for purpose and meaning in life when everything is going wrong.

The book’s title pokes fun at those who bombard cancer patients with unrealistic expectations and larger-than-life survival stories. But the book itself simply tells stories, incredible stories that will take you to the front lines of a husband and father's diagnosis, treatment, and search for hope.

In writing the book, Jim discovered how cancer patients face a paradigm shift that is unsettling, if not terrifying. As a result, he found that certain needs tend to arise. His ability to identify those needs and address them is the difference between the memoir that “hits home” and one that is a quick, forgettable read. And so, I Survived Cancer, but Never Won the Tour de France focuses on five practical needs cancer patients commonly experience: the need to laugh; the need to be real; the need to be informed; the need to be known; and the need to find hope. In so doing, the book relies heavily on humor.

So how do you make a cancer book humorous? By telling true stories that illustrate cancer’s curious contradictions, the paradoxical and frequently absurd situations cancer patients find themselves in. Yet beyond all the laughs, the book is also real, helpful, informative, and brutally honest about cancer's realities. The book takes a straightforward, but respectful approach to how devastating cancer can be. While remaining positive and hopeful, it never shies away from real emotion or jarring truth.

Antidotes & Home Remedies (Village Press Books, 2008) is Jim’s second poetry book. The first half of the book is comprised of health related poems, many of which were written while Jim was actively undergoing cancer treatments. The other half of the book springs from Jim’s journal as he processes this crazy thing called life. This half includes many of Jim’s most recognizable poems, including "On Remembering Poetry" and "Hero Worship."

Like Some First Human Being (Village Books Press, 2006) is taken from a line in the first chapter of Ranier Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. While Jim is not particularly young, he is, allegedly, a human being. The book has four chapters: Look; Life; Love; and Loss. Bramlett Multimedia designed the cover.

1. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
2. Lonesome Dove – Larry McMurtry
3. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
4. Crime and Punishment – Dostoevsky
5. Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
6. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
7. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
8. Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
9. 1984 – George Orwell
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
12. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
13. Night – Elie Wiesel
14. Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
15. Waiting – Ha Jin
16. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
17. Into Thin Air - Jon Krakauer
18. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
19. Main Street – Sinclair Lewis
20. Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain

21. The Giver – Lois Lowry
22. Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson
23. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers
24. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
25. The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner
26. The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky
27. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
28. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
29. Lolita – Vladamir Nabokov
30. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

31. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
32. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
33. Walking Light – Stephen Dunn
34. Mere Christianity – C.S. Lewis
35. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
36. American Pastoral – Philip Roth
37. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
38. Story – Robert McKee
39. The Hobbit – J.R.R Tolkien
40. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly -Jean-Dominique Dauby

41. The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
42. The Shining – Stephen King
43. A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
44. A Grief Observed – C.S. Lewis
45. Poetry Home Repair Manual – Ted Kooser
46. Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time – Stephen Mitchell
47. Bird by Bird – Anne LaMott
48. Traveling Mercies – Anne LaMott
49. Letters to a Young Poet - Ranier Maria Rilke
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan

51. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
52. The Hours – Michael Cunningham
53. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
54. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
55. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
56. Captain’s Courageous – Rudyard Kipling
57. Franny & Zooey - J.D. Salinger
58. Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
59. The Lessons of History - Will & Ariel Durant
60. Animal Farm - George Orwell

61. Life of Pi - Martel
62. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
63. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
64. Me Talk Pretty Someday – David Sedaris
65. The Shipping News – Annie Proulx
66. The Graduate - Charles Webb
67. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
68. On Writing – Stephen King
69. Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot – Al Franken
70. What’s So Amazing About Grace - Philip Yancey

71. Isaac’s Storm – Eric Larson
72. House of Sand and Fog – Andre Dubus
73. Windows of the Soul - Gire
74. The Bourne Identity – Robert Ludlum
75. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
76. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
77. Bound For Glory – Woody Guthrie
78. Wyoming Stories – Annie Proulx
79. Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored - Clifton Taulbert
80. Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them – Al Franken

81. Harry Potter # 4 - J.K. Rowling
82. Harry Potter # 7 - J.K. Rowling
83. Writing Down the Bones - Goldberg
84. Return of the King – J.R.R. Tolkien
85. Lost in the Cosmos – Walker Percy
86. Cold Mountain – Charles Frazier
87. The Kite Runner - Hosseini
88. The Human Stain – Philip Roth
89. My Antonia – Willa Cather
90. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce

91. Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett
92. People of the Lie – M. Scott Peck
93. A Man in Full – Tom Wolfe
94. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
95. Naked – David Sedaris
96. Chronicles – Bob Dylan
97. In A Sunburned Country - Bill Bryson
98. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
99. Tender is the Night - Fitzgerald
100. The Moviegoer – Walker Percy