Share Email Print RSS

What Richmond's Reading

1. "A New Earth"

By Eckhart Tolle

Oprah Winfrey's current book club selection is Tolle's follow-up to "The Power of Now." In his first full-length book in eight years, Tolle presents readers with an honest look at the current state of humanity. He asks us to accept that this state is based on an erroneous identification with the egoic mind. He gives us an alternative to this potentially dire situation that will involve a radical inner leap from the current egoic consciousness to an entirely new one.

2. "The Last Lecture"

By Randy Pausch

A lot of professors give talks titled "The Last Lecture." Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave -- "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" –wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment. It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.

 

3. "Belong To Me"

By Marisa de los Santos

As this sequel to "Love Walked In" begins, Cornelia Brown and her impossibly handsome husband, Teo Sandoval, are settling into their first house on an idyllic street in a picturesque Philadelphia suburb. Cornelia is inexplicably drawn to "this surprising place," but her neighbors are less sure of how these transplanted, apparently childless urbanites will fare in their midst.  As the novel progresses, new characters -- and old friends -- emerge. Deftly blending several tales at once, de los Santos' story is richly embroidered with intertwined lives and loves. A triumphant testimony to the power of love, "Belong to Me" hums with the hope that pulls friends through the ups and downs that the years hold in store for everyone.

4. "Eat, Pray, Love" 

By Elizabeth Gilbert

Oddly but aptly titled, "Eat, Pray, Love" is an experience to be savored. This spiritual memoir offers humor, grace and scorching honesty. After a messy divorce and other personal missteps, Elizabeth Gilbert confronts the "twin goons" of depression and loneliness by traveling to three countries that she intuited had something she was seeking. First, in Italy, she seeks to master the art of pleasure by indulging her senses. Then, in an Indian ashram, she learns the rigors and liberation of mind-exalting hours of meditation. Her final destination is Bali, where she achieves a precarious, yet precious equilibrium.

5. "Home: A Memoir of My Early Years"

By Julie Andrews

Since her first appearance on screen in "Mary Poppins," Julie Andrews has played a series of memorable roles that have endeared her to generations. But she has never told the story of her life before fame. In her new memoir, Julie takes her readers on a warm, moving and often humorous journey from a difficult upbringing in war-torn Britain to the brink of international stardom in America. "Home" is filled with numerous anecdotes and features more than 50 personal photos, many never before seen.

6. "Simple Genius"

By David Baldacci

 

A three-hour drive from Washington, D.C., two clandestine institutions face each other across a heavily guarded river. One is the world's most unusual laboratory and the other is an elite CIA training camp shrouded in secrecy. A man and a woman are about to run a gauntlet between these two puzzle factories, straight into a struggle to exploit a potentially world-shattering discovery. Former Secret Service agents turned private investigators Sean King and Michelle Maxwell have seen their lives splinter around them. Michelle lies unconscious in a hospital bed. Sean is forced to take on a thankless investigation into the murder of a scientist near Williamsburg. Soon he is uncovering layer after layer of disinformation that shields a stunning world filled with elite mathematics, physicists, war heroes, spies and deadly field agents. Amid more murder, a seemingly autistic girl's extraordinary genius, and a powerful breakthrough in the realm of classified codes, Sean soon learns enough to put his life at risk.

7. "Bulls Island"

By Dorothea Frank

After 20 years, Elizabeth "Betts" McGee has finally managed to put her past behind her. She hasn't been home to beautiful South Carolina and untouched Bulls Island since the tragic night that ended her engagement to Charleston's golden boy, J.D. Langley. Now 20 years have gone by and Betts, a top investment bank executive, must leave her comfortable life in New York to return to the home she thought she'd left behind forever. But spearheading the most important project of her career puts her back in contact with everything she's tried so hard to forget: her estranged sister, her father, J.D. and her past.

8. "Unaccustomed Earth"

By Jhumpa Lahiri

In this collection of short stories, Jhumpa Lahiri has taken what would seem a narrow slice of the immigrant narrative and sent it sprawling. Its eight stories find Lahiri retreading familiar ground yet also staking out new territory -- the difficult landscape of American adulthood. In the story "Hell-Heaven," the crushing collapse of a platonic romance happens, as it were, offstage.  Other highlights include the three interlinked stories that finish the collection. Her stories are threaded together by a current of loss -- of lovers, of parents, of home.

9. "Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon - and the Journey of a Generation"

By Sheila Weller

Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon remain among the most enduring and important women in popular music. Their stories trace the arc of the now mythic '60s generation, but in a bracingly specific and deeply recalled way, far from cliché. Filled with the voices of many dozens of these women's intimates, this alternating biography reads like a novel, except it's all true, and the heroines are famous and beloved. "Girls Like Us" is an epic treatment of mid-century women who dared to break tradition and become what none had been before them -- confessors in song, rock superstars and adventurers of heart and soul.

10. "The Audacity of Hope"

By Barack Obama

In "The Audacity of Hope," Obama calls for a different brand of politics -- a politics rooted in the faith, inclusiveness and nobility of spirit at the heart of "our improbable experiment in democracy." He also writes about settling in as a senator, seeking to balance the demands of public service and family life, and his own deepening religious commitment.  With surprising intimacy and self-deprecating humor, Sen. Obama has written a book of transforming power. Only by returning to the principles that gave birth to our Constitution can we restore a government that has fallen dangerously out of touch with millions of ordinary Americans.