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The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The mystical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure. His quest will lead him to riches far different — and far more satisfying — than he ever imagined. Santiago’s journey teaches us about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, of recognizing opportunity, and, most importantly, to follow our dreams.
Becoming by Michelle Obama
Michelle Robinson grew up on the South Side of Chicago. But life soon took her to Princeton, where she learned what it felt like to be the only black woman in a room, to the glassy office tower where she worked as a high-powered corporate lawyer – and where a law student named Barack Obama upended all her plans. Narrating with grace, good humor, and uncommon candor, she provides a vivid, behind-the-scenes account of her family’s history-making launch into the global limelight as well as their life inside the White House over eight momentous years.
Daring Greatly by Brené Brown
Brown is the first to admit that vulnerability makes her uncomfortable, but posits that daring to fail is the only true way to be wholeheartedly engaged in any aspect of life. “Experiencing vulnerability isn’t a choice — the only choice we have is how we’re going to respond when we are confronted with uncertainty, risk and emotional disclosure,” she says. Laying out a road map for change, Brown includes chapters on eliminating blame and shame from work and education, and daring to be the adults we want our children to be.
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Gilbert tells how she made the difficult choice to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success (marriage, house in the country, career) and find, instead, what she truly wanted from life. Setting out for a year to study three different aspects of her nature amid three different cultures, Gilbert explored the art of pleasure in Italy and the art of devotion in India, and then a balance between the two on the Indonesian island of Bali.
Educated by Tara Westover
Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the Idaho mountains, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her “head-for-the-hills bag.” The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when an older brother became violent. When another brother got himself into college and came back with news of the world beyond the mountain, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Meet Eleanor Oliphant: she struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Eleanor has become a creature of habit (to say the least) and a bit of a loner. But everything changes when she meets Raymond, the bumbling IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kind of friends who rescue each other from the lives of isolation they have each been living.
The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
Miguel Ruiz reveals the source of self-limiting beliefs that rob us of joy and create needless suffering. The Four Agreements are: be impeccable with your word, don’t take anything personally, don’t make assumptions, and always do your best. Based on ancient Toltec wisdom, The Four Agreements offer a powerful code of conduct that can rapidly transform our lives to a new experience of freedom, true happiness, and love.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Orphaned and subject to a cruel regime at Lowood charity school, Jane nonetheless emerges unbroken in spirit and integrity. How she takes up the post of governess at Thornfield Hall, meets and loves Mr. Rochester, and discovers the impediment to their lawful marriage are elements in a story that transcends melodrama to portray a woman’s passionate search for a wider and richer life than traditionally accorded to her sex in Victorian society.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Pi Patel is the son of a zookeeper, and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes. The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with Richard Parker for 227 days lost at sea.
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
Shaker Heights, a wealthy suburb of Cleveland, is home to the mostly content Richardson family of six. Artist Mia and her teenage daughter, Pearl, decide to settle down and rent an apartment from the family. Pearl bonds with the Richardson teens, and life seems idyllic until a custody battle erupts. Elena Richardson’s friend is adopting a baby whose biological mother, a friend of Mia’s, regrets her decision to abandon the child. Ng sensitively examines adoption, privilege, and race as the well-off white couple and the child’s biological mother, a Chinese immigrant who initially gave up the child out of financial necessity, fight for parental rights.
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
A Viennese psychiatrist tells of his grim experiences in a German concentration camp which led him to an existential method of psychiatry. Between 1942 and 1945, the author labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the stories of his many patients, he argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. His theory, known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos (meaning), holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Nora Seed believes her life is made up of wrong choices. She didn’t become an Olympic swimmer; she quit her brother’s band; she left her fiancé two days before the wedding. Living with crippling disappointment and situational depression, Nora decides that the only right choice is to end her existence. But “between life and death there is a midnight library,” which contains multiple volumes of the lives she could have had if she had made different choices. With the help of the friendly librarian Mrs. Elm, Nora tries on these lives in hopes of finding one where she will truly be happy.
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
An Indian American saga covering several generations of the Ganguli family. Newlyweds Ashoke and Ashima leave India for Boston shortly after their traditional arranged marriage. Ashoke, an engineering grad student, is ready to be part of U.S. culture, but Ashima, disoriented and homesick, is less taken with it. She develops lifelong friendships with other Bengali expatriates, preserving the old ways in a new country. When their son is born, he is named Gogol in commemoration of a strange, life-saving encounter with the Russian writer’s oeuvre. As Gogol matures, he struggles with the tensions and confusions of growing up as a first-generation American.
Normal People by Sally Rooney
At school, Connell is popular and well-adjusted, while Marianne is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell picks his mother up from her job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between them – one they conceal. A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. As she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
Eckhart Tolle’s message is simple: living in the now is the truest path to happiness and enlightenment. Tolle’s clear writing, supportive voice, and enthusiasm make this an excellent manual for anyone who’s ever wondered what exactly “living in the now” means. Tolle explains complicated concepts in concrete language. Within a chapter, readers are already more conscious of how thoughts and emotions get in the way of their ability to live in genuine peace and happiness. Topics include the source of Chi, enlightened relationships, creative use of the mind, impermanence, and the cycle of life. Tolle also adds “break time” markers when readers should close the book and mull over what they just read. It reads like a spiritual guidebook that has the potential to inspire and change lives for the better.
Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking by Susan Cain
Cain demonstrates how introverted people are misunderstood and undervalued in modern culture, charting the rise of extrovert ideology while sharing anecdotal examples of how to use introvert talents to adapt to various situations. At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking, reading to partying; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over brainstorming in teams. Although they are often labeled “quiet,” it is to introverts that we owe many of the great contributions to society, from van Gogh’s sunflowers to the invention of the personal computer. Filled with indelible stories of real people, this book shows how dramatically we undervalue introverts, and how much we lose in doing so.
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Siddhartha’s life takes him on a journey toward enlightenment. Afire with youthful idealism, the Brahmin joins a group of ascetics, fasting and living without possessions. Meeting Gotama the Buddha, he comes to feel this is not the right path, though he also declines joining the Buddha’s followers. He reenters the world, hoping to learn of his own nature, but instead slips gradually into hedonism and materialism. Surfeited and disgusted, he flees from his possessions to become a ferryman’s apprentice, learning what lessons he can from the river itself. Hesse’s 1922 bildungsroman parallels the life of Buddha and seems to argue that lessons of this sort cannot be taught but come from one’s own struggle to find truth.
Still Me by Jojo Moyes
Louisa Clark arrives in New York to start a new life, confident that she can embrace this new adventure and keep her relationship with Ambulance Sam alive across several thousand miles. She is thrown into the world of the superrich Gopniks: Leonard and his much younger second wife, Agnes, and their household staff and hangers-on. Lou throws herself into her job and New York life within this privileged world. Before long, she is mixing with New York high society, where she meets Joshua Ryan, a man who brings with him a whisper of her past. As Lou tries to keep the two sides of her world together, she finds herself carrying secrets – not all her own – that cause a catastrophic change in her circumstances. And she has to ask herself, Who is Louisa Clark? And how do you reconcile a heart that lives in two places?
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
At 36, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of neurosurgeon training, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. This memoir chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student, into a neurosurgeon at Stanford, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.
Wild: from lost to found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
Grieving for her recently deceased mother and a failed marriage, Strayed slipped into heroin addiction and a destructive lifestyle before deciding on a whim to hike the grueling Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) at age 26. Part memoir and part adventure story, Strayed’s chronicle of her 1100-mile hike describes her suffering through blisters and bruises, threats from rattlesnakes, extreme thirst, bears, a predatory hunter, and intense loneliness, all while carrying her huge pack nicknamed “Monster.” Strayed writes with startling and heartbreaking clarity as she relates her mother’s sad death at 45, as well as the physical and psychological transformation she underwent while on the trail. Her account forms a charming, intrepid trial by fire, as she emerges from the ordeal bruised but not beaten, changed, a lone survivor.
To find more great books go to our book recommendation page and browse book lists created by the librarians at Robbins.