You asked for this and we answered. We're offering a women-only Road Scholar Ethel tour of New York City/Broadway in October! Our March trip sold out quickly so please have a look — and join us! It was be amazing!
Certain books just stay with you, even years after you’ve read them. I enjoy a light, breezy story, but it’s the more challenging stories that have lasting impact. A great read can open your eyes. Maybe it gives you a new perspective, a different way to see things. Perhaps it introduces you to a place you’ve never visited before — either literally or psychologically.
These four books — two novels and two memoirs — checked every box and more for me. I had trouble putting them down. Each one provided a new level of understanding, as well as exposure to worlds I’d never known. In doing so, they changed my life.
Educated by Tara Westover
Educated, a memoir by Tara Westover, is a coming-of-age story like few I’ve ever read.
Born the youngest of seven, Westover’s early life was completely circumscribed by her Idaho family. Her father was a survivalist who scrapped metal in a junk yard. Her mother made herbal remedies and worked as an unlicensed midwife. Her parents rejected outsiders, including doctors and teachers. Westover didn’t even have a birth certificate.
The children were supposedly home-schooled but mostly worked in their father’s junkyard. When someone got hurt — and there were frequent horrific accidents — they recovered as best they could on their own. Life was violent, dangerous and incredibly isolated.
Westover begins to educate herself through books that an older brother secretly passes to her. Eventually, she gets herself to Brigham Young University, where she is constantly confronted by her ignorance. Westover had never heard of the Holocaust or Martin Luther King, and thought Europe was a country.
Eventually she gets a doctorate degree at Cambridge University and becomes a historian. Telling her story came at the cost of estrangement from much of her family. While it’s just one woman’s story, Educated is also a window into our fractured country, and the wildly different realities in which we live.
The Overstory by Richard Powers
Sometimes a book comes along that changes how you look at the world — literally.
The Overstory was one of those books for me. At first, the novel, which spans centuries, appears to be a series of disconnected, individual stories. Among those you’ll meet are a family of 19th century Norwegian immigrants, a Viet Nam war veteran, the daughter of a deeply troubled Chinese immigrant, an 11-year-old computer coding prodigy, and a young girl who loves trees and grows up to be a scientist.
Eventually, their stories all connect, and they do so through trees. The unfolding drama that brings them together involves activism, resistance and betrayal, with trees always central to the story. The tree connection works as a metaphor because as scientists have documented, trees are a vast, interconnected species, with the ability to communicate and cooperate, even warning each other of encroaching danger.
In fact, you could say that trees are the real protagonist in this novel. Powers talks about their beauty, their ancient nature (he describes “redwoods 30 stories tall and as old as Jesus”) and as sentient, complex beings. Each of the people in the book faces some kind of major reckoning, but so does the reader. Powers wants us to understand how destructive humanity has been on the earth and on other species.
Whether or not you’ve ever given a thought to the timbering industry, you will never look at a wooden table or chair, let alone a forest, in quite the same way. Along the ride, you will enjoy Powers’ gorgeous writing and compassionate heart.
Room by Emma Donahue
Our narrator is five-year-old Jack. He lives in an 11-ft-by-11-ft room with his mother, whom he calls “Ma.” Jack personifies many objects in his small space: "Bed,” “Rug” and “Plant” are all friends. If this sounds cutesy, be forewarned that it’s anything but that.
Room is many things: a thriller, a novel of psychological suspense and, ultimately, an intense story of parental love.
The reader’s understanding of what’s going on expands with Jack’s. The only home he’s ever known is actually a cramped prison — a locked shed. “Ma” was kidnapped seven years earlier; Jack’s father is her abductor. He grudgingly drops off food and supplies. Jack sleeps inside a clothes cupboard while the man comes at night to “make Ma’s bedsprings creak.”
Within these horrific constraints, Jack’s mother attempts to give him a normal childhood. She creates structured days, which include “gym” (running around a cramped, improvised track) and reading. Books are treasures, and they read the same few over and over. “Ma,” the only name we know her by, creates toys out of trash, stringing eggshells together to make a snake. This is the only world Jack knows. There’s a TV in Room, but Ma teaches Jack that what he sees on it is fake. Only Room is real.
It becomes increasingly urgent that Ma and Jack escape, but how? And can he adjust to being outside the only world he’s ever known? As dark as the subject matter is, Room is ultimately a story of resilience, faith and the fierce power of love.
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
In the opening scene of this stunning memoir, Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgery resident at Stanford University School of Medicine, is sitting at a computer, pouring over CT scans. What he sees is a deformed spine, a nearly obliterated liver and lungs riddled with inoperable cancerous tumors. “I’d examined scores of such scans,” he writes. “But this scan was different. It was my own.”
In that moment, Kalanithi made the dizzying trip from being a doctor treating the dying to a patient confronting his own mortality.
The book, published posthumously, is in two parts. After he reveals his diagnosis, Kalanithi goes back in time, reviewing his decision to become a physician, his ravenous ambition and his lifelong quest to understand “what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life.” Kalanithi comes from a family of doctors, and at first, he was uninterested in pursuing medicine. He was interested in a bigger picture: how philosophy, biology and literature intersected. Only eventually does that search lead him to neurology.
The second half discusses his life as a patient, husband and new father. Just before his diagnosis, Kalanithi’s marriage is floundering. After his diagnosis, with his wife recommitted to him, they navigate parenthood. Inevitably, this book will make you feel gratitude for every breath you take.
What book changed YOUR life? Let us know in the comments below.
AARP
Follow Article Topics: Fulfillment
