Friday, January 28, 2011

Meditation audiobooks

Many of us may have made New Year's resolutions to be more mindful and less stressed, but it can be hard to know where to start.  Thankfully, there is a wide variety of meditation audiobooks available to help you on your way.  The New York Times reports that there is scientific evidence that meditation works.  From the article:

"M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the participants’ meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes."

Click here to read the rest.

And here are some great audiobook options:

Meditations for Relaxation

The three guided meditations offered in this accessible resource allow even the busiest people to enjoy the calming benefits of slowing their thoughts and resting their minds. The stress-reducing and tension-easing techniques are designed to help relax the body and mind, and thus, discover the enlightened experience of inner-serenity and harmony.  [read more]


Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief

Mindfulness can transform pain. Over the past three decades, Jon Kabat-Zinn has clinically proven it. Now, with Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief, the man who brought mindfulness into mainstream medicine presents for the first time on audio his original practices for using conscious awareness to free us from physical and emotional suffering.  [read more]

The Yoga of Sleep

Dr. Andrew Weil has called his colleague Dr. Rubin Naimana a true pioneer in integrative sleep and dream medicine. Dr. Naiman has given us a new understanding of human consciousness that weaves sleep, dreams, and waking into a unified whole. [read more]


Meditation for Beginners

Meditation for Beginners is Jack Kornfield's most popular entry-level training course, with over 60,000 copies sold. Created specifically for novices, this complete introduction to meditation features four classical mindfulness exercises.  [read more]

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Elmore Leonard brings the sunshine

When it's grey and snowing (as it is likely to be for the next little while), what could be better than a funny mystery set in a sunny climate?  If you're in the mood for something light, try Elmore Leonard.  Pirates?  He's got them!  Daredevils, mobsters, and assorted other unsavory characters?  Those are there too.  If you're still not convinced, here's a review of Leonard's newest book, Djibouti, from the London Evening Standard:

"Famously, Leonard constructs his thrillers by leaving all the boring bits out, even at the level of a single sentence. It can't be as easy as he makes it look, because, after all these years, there's still nobody who does it better. Or even half as well. Ridiculously enjoyable book."

Click to read the rest of the review.

If you want more, check out Leonard's website at http://www.elmoreleonard.com or click here for a list of his audiobooks.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Born to Run by Christopher McDougall

Christopher McDougall's Born to Run is one of the best audiobooks we've heard in awhile. It's a fantastic combination of memoir, anthropology, and science, all focused around the subject of ultra marathon runners--people who run 100 miles or more at a time.  This unusual group includes college party-goers, doctors, and a small group of native Mexicans who live deep in a barely accessible canyon, and the best part of the audiobook is when they all come together to race.

Don't worry if you're not a runner yourself--Born to Run is still fascinating.  You will never forget Caballo Blanco, a mysterious American who lives and runs in Mexico, or Barefoot Ted, who runs barefoot even in insanely harsh terrain.  The story moves quickly, especially when it's describing ultra marathons, and the narrator is fantastic.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Snooki and Giller winners

In news we never thought we'd see, here's a link to Giller Prize winners reading an excerpt from Snooki's novel, A Shore Thing.

http://www.cbc.ca/day6/blog/2011/01/07/giller-winners-read-snookis-book/

Friday, January 14, 2011

Fiction New Releases

Hell's Corner by David Baldacci

John Carr, aka Oliver Stone-once the most skilled assassin his country ever had-stands in Lafayette Park in front of the White House, perhaps for the last time. The president has personally requested that Stone serve his country again on a high-risk, covert mission. Though he's fought for decades to leave his past career behind, Stone has no choice but to say yes.  [read more]

Dead or Alive by Tom Clancy

Dead or Alive brings together - for the first time - an all-star cast of Clancy's greatest characters in a joint showdown with global terrorists.

Jack Ryan, the former president of the United States, is out of office, but not out of the loop about his brainchild, the "Campus" - a highly effective, counter-terrorism organization that operates outside the Washington hierarchy. But what Ryan doesn't know is that his son, Jack Ryan, Jr., has joined his cousins, Brian and Dominic Caruso, at the shadowy Campus. While a highly effective analyst, young Ryan hungers for the action of a field agent. [read more]

American Assassin by Vince Flynn

Before he was considered a CIA superagent, before he was thought of as a terrorist's worst nightmare, and before he was both loathed and admired by the politicians on Capitol Hill, Mitch Rapp was a gifted college athlete without a care in the world... and then tragedy struck.

Two decades of cutthroat, partisan politics has left the CIA and the country in an increasingly vulnerable position. Cold War veteran and CIA Operations Director Thomas Stansfield knows he must prepare his people for the next war....[read more]

What the Night Knows by Dean Koontz

In the late summer of a long-ago year, a killer arrived in a small city. His name was Alton Turner Blackwood, and in the space of a few months he brutally murdered four families. His savage spree ended only when he himself was killed by the last survivor of the last family, a 14-year-old boy.

Half a continent away and two decades later, someone is murdering families again, re-creating in detail Blackwood's crimes.  [read more]

Towers of Midnight by Robert Jordan

The Last Battle has started. The seals on the Dark One's prison are crumbling. The Pattern itself is unraveling, and the armies of the Shadow have begun to boil out of the Blight. The sun has begun to set upon the Third Age. Perrin Aybara is now hunted by specters from his past: Whitecloaks, a slayer of wolves, and the responsibilities of leadership. All the while, an unseen foe is slowly pulling a noose tight around his neck. To prevail, he must seek answers in Tel'aran'rhiod and find a way - at long last - to master the wolf within him or lose himself to it forever.  [read more]

An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin

Lacey Yeager is young, captivating, and ambitious enough to take the New York art world by storm. Groomed at Sotheby's and hungry to keep climbing the social and career ladders put before her, Lacey charms men and women, old and young, rich and even richer with her magnetic charisma and liveliness. Her ascension to the highest tiers of the city parallel the soaring heights - and, at times, the dark lows - of the art world and the country from the late 1990s through today.  [read more]

The Outlaws by WEB Griffin

Things are not exactly what they used to be for Charley Castillo. The former Presidential Agent's Office of Organizational Analysis has been disbanded, he and his colleagues have been abruptly retired, and the sudden death of the President has brought a much more unsympathetic commander-in-chief into the Oval Office. [read more]

Dead Zero by Stephen Hunter

Who killed Whiskey 2-2? And why won't it stay dead?

A marine sniper team on a mission in tribal territories on the Afghan-Pakistan border, Whiskey 2-2 is ambushed by professionals using the latest high-tech shooting gear. Badly wounded, the team's sole survivor, Gunnery Sergeant Ray Cruz, aka "the Cruise Missile", is determined to finish his job. He almost succeeds when a mystery blast terminates his enterprise, leaving a 30-foot crater where a building used to be - and where Sergeant Cruz was meant to be hiding.  [read more]

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Non Fiction New Releases

The Soul of Leadership by Deepak Chopra

Best-selling author and spiritual guide Deepak Chopra invites you to become the kind of leader most needed today: a leader with vision who can make that vision real. Chopra has been teaching leadership to CEOs and other top executives for eight years, and the path outlined in The Soul of Leadership applies to any business, but the same principles are relevant in every community and area of life, from family and home to school, place of worship, and neighborhood.  [read more]

Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff

Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. Though her life spanned fewer than 40 years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties.  [read more]

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane's bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.  [read more]

A Course in Weight Loss by Marianne Williamson

What is the connection between spirituality and weight loss? Best-selling author Marianne Williamson is about to answer that question for you in her groundbreaking new audiobook, bringing you 21 spiritual lessons to help you surrender your weight forever. These lessons form a holistic paradigm for weight loss, addressing the spiritual, emotional, and psychological elements involved in what Williamson refers to as "conscious weight loss." If you are a food addict, a compulsive eater, or someone who for any reason sees food as the enemy, this book is for you.  [read more]

Shit My Dad Says by Justin Halpern

After being dumped by his longtime girlfriend, 28-year-old Justin Halpern found himself living at home with his 73-year-old dad. Sam Halpern, who is "like Socrates, but angrier, and with worse hair," has never minced words, and when Justin moved back home, he began to record all the ridiculous things his dad said to him. [read more]

Unbearable Lightness by Portia de Rossi

Portia de Rossi weighed only 82 pounds when she collapsed on the set of the Hollywood film in which she was playing her first leading role. This should have been the culmination of all her years of hard work - first as a child model in Australia, then as a cast member of one of the hottest shows on American television. On the outside she was thin and blond, glamorous and successful. On the inside, she was literally dying.  [read more]

Sell Like a Pro by Dale Carnegie

Among Carnegie Training's most popular and enduring courses are its seminars on sales and selling. Now Carnegie's classic sales training course---normally costing thousands of dollars and delivered over several days or weeks---is available in this new audio program for a fraction of the price! Sell Like a Pro will introduce listeners to a sales process that is second to none.  [read more]

The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor

Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we'll be happy. If we can just find that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology have shown that this formula is actually backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around. [read more]

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Timothy Ferris might be a little strange

How do you follow up a bestselling audiobook about how to achieve better work/life balance?  Apparently by writing a really, really strange diet book.  Whether or not you're a fan of Timothy Ferriss, it is well worth checking out the New York Times review of his new audiobook, The 4-Hour Body.  Here's a sample:

"Everything about Mr. Ferriss’s book declares: This is not your auntie’s self-help book. No muffled 'I’m OK — You’re OK' tone here. The vibe is: I’m Superbad, bro, and I have dimples. You’re a mole person who, if you become an angel investor in my books, might someday touch the hem of my Speedo." 

Do note that this review is not for the faint of heart--it goes into detail about some of the more unusual of Ferriss's suggestions.

Click here for the rest of the article, or click here for the audiobook.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

New Lawrence Hill story

For those of you who loved Book of Negroes, there's a new Lawrence Hill story posted on The Walrus.  No audio edition, unfortunately, but hopefully his next book will have an audio version!

Click here for "Meet You At the Door"