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"The Namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri Length: 10 hours and 5 min. ISBN: 0-7393-0695-2 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

The Namesake follows the Ganguli family through its journey from Calcutta to Cambridge to the Boston suburbs. Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli arrive in America at the end of the 1960s, shortly after their arranged marriage in Calcutta, in order for Ashoke to finish his engineering degree at MIT. Ashoke is forward-thinking, ready to enter into American culture if not fully at least with an open mind. His young bride is far less malleable. Isolated, desperately missing her large family back in India, she will never be at peace with this new world.

Soon after they arrive in Cambridge, their first child is born, a boy. According to Indian custom, the child will be given two names: an official name, to be bestowed by the great-grandmother, and a pet name to be used only by family. But the letter from India with the child’s official name never arrives, and so the baby’s parents decide on a pet name to use for the time being. Ashoke chooses a name that has particular significance for him: on a train trip back in India several years earlier, he had been reading a short story collection by one of his most beloved Russian writers, Nikolai Gogol, when the train derailed in the middle of the night, killing almost all the sleeping passengers onboard. Ashoke had stayed awake to read his Gogol, and he believes the book saved his life. His child will be known, then, as Gogol.

Lahiri brings her enormous powers of description to her first novel, infusing scene after scene with profound emotional depth. Condensed and controlled, The Namesake covers three decades and crosses continents, all the while zooming in at very precise moments on telling detail, sensory richness, and fine nuances of character.

Tags: the namesake, jhumpa lahiri, education, fiction, k-12 educators, parents & family, students, india, mit, interpreter of maladies, boston, gogol

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"Amazing Peace and Other Poems" by Maya Angelou Length: 29 min. ISBN: New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

Listen to Grammy Award-winning poet Maya Angelou read her newest work, “Amazing Peace”, as well as some of her best-loved poems in this unique and inspiring audio collection.

“Amazing Peace” is a beautiful and deeply moving poem from Maya Angelou. Here she inspires us to embrace the peace and promise of Christmas, so that hope and love can once again light up our holidays and the world. “Angels and Mortals, Believers and Nonbelievers, look heavenward,” she writes, “and speak the word aloud. Peace.”

“Amazing Peace” is Maya Angelou’s radiant affirmation of the goodness of life and is a touching celebration of the “Glad Season” that will resonate with people of all faiths.

Also included in this program is her Grammy Award-winning reading of “On the Pulse of Morning”, the poem that she created for the inauguration of President William Jefferson Clinton in January 1993. Nearly 13 years later this poem remains just as profound a listening experience.

Additionally, the program includes the four poems that make up Phenomenal Woman. The poems are among the most acclaimed of Maya Angelou’s body of work. They celebrate women with a majesty that has inspired and touched the hearts of millions. Together with “Amazing Peace” and “On the Pulse of Morning”, this is a beautiful and unique collection of Maya Angelou’s writing read aloud in her distinctive and sonorous voice.

Maya Angelou, poet, writer, performer, teacher, and director, was raised in Stamps, Arkansas, and then moved to San Francisco. In addition to her best-selling biographies, beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she has also written a memoir with recipes, Hallelujah! The Welcome Table; five poetry collections, including I Shall Not Be Moved and Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing?; and many other celebrated poems.

Tags: amazing peace and other poems, maya angelou, arts & entertainment, audibleoriginals, poetry & drama, students, on the pulse of morning, christmas tree lighting, phenomenal woman, glad season, poem, poetry

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"Eragon: The Inheritance Trilogy, Book 1" by Christopher Paolini Length: 16 hours and 26 min. ISBN: 0-8072-1962-2 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

One boy. One dragon. A world of adventure.

When Eragon finds a polished blue stone in the forest, he thinks it is the lucky discovery of a poor farm boy; perhaps it will buy his family meat for the winter. But when the stone brings a dragon hatchling, Eragon realizes he has stumbled upon a legacy nearly as old as the Empire itself.

Overnight his simple life is shattered, and he is thrust into a perilous new world of destiny, magic, and power. With only an ancient sword and the advice of an old storyteller for guidance, Eragon and the fledgling dragon must navigate the dangerous terrain and dark enemies of an Empire ruled by a king whose evil knows no bounds.

Can Eragon take up the mantle of the legendary Dragon Riders? The fate of the Empire may rest in his hands.

Tags: eragon: the inheritance trilogy, book 1, christopher paolini, fiction, k-12 educators, kids, parents & family, science fiction & fantasy, students, young adults, dragon, fantasy, inheritance, today show, terry goodkind

• Eldest: The Inheritance Trilogy, Book 2
• Eldest: The Inheritance Trilogy, Book 2, Volume I

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"Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson Length: 8 hours and 59 min. ISBN: 1-59397-822-7 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He “preached men into the Civil War”, then, at age 50, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father, an ardent pacifist, and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend’s wayward son.

This is also the tale of another remarkable vision, not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames’s soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.

Gilead is the long-hoped-for second novel by one of our finest writers, a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.

Tags: gilead, marilynne robinson, education, fiction, higher education faculty, k-12 educators, parents & family, students, pulitzer, fathers and sons, vision, wisdom

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"Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx Length: 1 hour and 4 min. ISBN: 0-7435-5010-2 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they’re working as sheepherder and camp tender one summer on a range above the tree line. At first, sharing an isolated tent, the attraction is casual, inevitable, but something deeper catches them that summer.

Both men work hard, marry, and have kids because that’s what cowboys do. But over the course of many years and frequent separations this relationship becomes the most important thing in their lives, and they do anything they can to preserve it.

Tags: brokeback mountain, annie proulx, fiction, higher education faculty, parents & family, students, cowboy, homosexuality, gay