Community Reads

A Cup of Water Under My Bed is Daisy Hernández’s 2014 coming-of-age story that centers the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The book received Lambda Literary’s Dr. Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award in 2015. Hernández was also awarded the IPPY Award (Independent Publisher Book Award) for best coming-of-age memoir, and the book was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle Award. This memoir highlights the complicated dynamics that shape race, class, gender, and sexual... Read A Cup of Water Under My Bed Summary

A Lesson Before Dying, by Ernest J. Gaines, is an award-winning work of fiction published in 1993. It received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction that same year. The story is arguably a work of historical fiction based on true accounts of young Black men on death row in Louisiana in the 1940s.Plot SummaryThe story opens in a courtroom in 1947 Louisiana, where a 21-year-old Black man named Jefferson, is accused of killing... Read A Lesson Before Dying Summary

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A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail is a 1998 travel book by American-British author Bill Bryson. The book was a New York Times bestseller, and a 2014 Cable News Network (CNN) poll named it the funniest travel book ever written. In addition, it inspired the 2015 film A Walk in the Woods starring Robert Redford as Bryson, Nick Nolte as Stephen Katz (his primary hiking companion), and Emma Thompson as... Read A Walk in the Woods Summary

First published in 1968, Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea follows Ged, a young man in training to be a wizard, as he embarks on a necessary journey of self-discovery and self-mastery. It is the first in a series of six novels aimed at young-adult readers. The novel has won numerous awards and is regarded as a classic of young adult fantasy literature. Set over the course of several years, the novel follows... Read A Wizard of Earthsea Summary

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2000) is a short, semi-autobiographical novel by Dai Sijie. The narrative is set during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and follows two teenage boys who are sent to a remote mountain village for re-education. The boys become close with the local tailor’s daughter and uncover a hidden stash of forbidden Western literature. The books introduce them to ideas, emotions, and freedoms they have never known, and awaken in the Little... Read Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress Summary

Because of Winn-Dixie is a middle-grade novel by Kate DiCamillo published in 2000 by Candlewick Books. It follows main character Opal as she learns to love her new home in Naomi, Florida with the help of a stray dog named Winn-Dixie. Steeped in the traditions of Southern literature, the book won a Newbery Honor and a Parents’ Choice Gold Award, among other awards. Note on Edition: This guide uses the 2000 edition published by Candlewick Books... Read Because of Winn-Dixie Summary

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Binti: The Complete Trilogy is a series of science fiction novellas written by Nnedi Okorafor, author of the Akata Witch series. First published in 2015, Binti has won multiple prestigious literary awards, including the 2016 Hugo Award, the 2015 Nebula Award, and the 2016 British Fantasy Award for Best Novella. The 2019 omnibus publication includes the three novellas Binti, Binti: Home, and Binti: The Night Masquerade, as well as the bonus inclusion of the debut... Read Binti Summary

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese was published in 2009. Verghese, an Indian American doctor born in Ethiopia, interrupted his medical career to attend the University of Iowa’s Writing Workshop and wrote two memoirs before publishing this novel. The book is notable for its incorporation of medical knowledge and its intimate portrayal of the lives of medical doctors. The novel spans several decades, weaving a deeply personal story with the complex 20th-century history of Ethiopia... Read Cutting for Stone Summary

Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States is a memoir originally published in 1993 by Sister Helen Prejean. In the book, Prejean, a Catholic nun with the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Medaille (now the Congregation of Saint Joseph), describes her ministry to death-row inmates Elmo Patrick Sonnier and Robert Lee Willie in Louisiana in the early 1980s. Her experience with Sonnier, who was ultimately put to death... Read Dead Man Walking Summary

Celeste Ng is an American writer whose parents emigrated to the United States from Hong Kong in the late 1960s. She was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. Her debut novel Everything I Never Told You achieved both commercial and critical success, becoming a New York Times best-seller as well as Amazon’s Best Book of the Year in 2014 and a New York Times Notable Book of 2014.In his New York Times review... Read Everything I Never Told You Summary

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In their 2009 nonfiction book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, husband-and-wife journalist team Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn document what they consider the paramount moral challenge of the 21st century: the oppression of women and girls. The book was an international bestseller, inspired a four-part PBS documentary of the same name, and launched the Half the Sky movement.Like many journalists, when Kristof and WuDunn first began their careers, they... Read Half the Sky Summary

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford is a historical novel published in 2009. The story follows Henry Lee at two pivotal stages in his life—in 1942, when he is a 12-year-old with a crush on a Japanese girl, and in 1986, when he is recently widowed. The book, Ford’s debut novel, spent 130 weeks atop the New York Times Best-Seller List and won the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature... Read Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet Summary

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I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings is an autobiographical novel by Maya Angelou. Angelou discusses the struggles of growing up African American in the 1950s. The novel has themes of overcoming adversity and trauma, both used as a general metaphor for the struggle against racism. Angelou wrote the novel as a challenge to create literature out of an autobiography, and what emerged is a classic that is still revered today.The novel begins on a... Read I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings Summary

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While many know the story of the sinking of the Titanic, fewer have heard the story of the Essex, a whaling ship that was sunk after being repeatedly rammed by an enormous whale during a whaling expedition in 1820. At one time, however, the story of the Essex was the most famous story of maritime tragedy in the United States, even inspiring certain aspects of Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick. Nathaniel Philbrick’s account of the journey... Read In the Heart of the Sea Summary

Into Thin Air is American is authored by professional mountain climber Jon Krakauer. It is a personal account of attempting to ascend Mount Everest, prompted by an assignment from Outside magazine to cover the commercial development of the communities at the mountain’s base. Krakauer’s climbing attempt, which was fatal for several, became the deadliest expedition ever on the mountain. In the book, he reflects on his experience, reporting it as truthfully as possible.Krakauer recalls being... Read Into Thin Air Summary

Part memoir, part exhortation for much-needed reform to the American criminal justice system, Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy is a heartrending and inspirational call to arms written by the activist lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama-based organization responsible for freeing or reducing the sentences of scores of wrongfully convicted individuals. Stevenson’s memoir weaves together personal stories from his years as a lawyer with strong statements against racial and legal injustice, drawing a clear... Read Just Mercy Summary

Kitchens of the Great Midwest (2015) by J. Ryan Stradal is an immersive novel delving into the rich heritage and lifestyles of Midwestern Americans who are descendants of Norwegian immigrants navigating the challenges of the Dakota prairies and open country. The narrative unfolds as they forge a living, experience love, endure financial setbacks, and persevere in an unforgiving territory. This culinary journey serves as a window into the heart of the Midwest, capturing traditions like... Read Kitchens of the Great Midwest Summary

Professor Hope Jahren’s 2016 memoir, Lab Girl, chronicles the author’s life and experience as a geobiologist. The memoir contains three parts, each spanning a major period in Jahren’s life. Autobiographical chapters are followed by brief, lyrical chapters examining various plants and their habits. These chapters on plants contain extensive use of personification, relating plant experience to that of humans.Part 1, “Roots and Leaves,” spans Jahren’s childhood to her first teaching job.The author grows up in... Read Lab Girl Summary

Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World is a 2003 nonfiction book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder. It is an expansion of “The Good Doctor,” a 2000 article for The New Yorker and the winner of the 2004 Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage. The book profiles Dr. Paul Edward Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health, as he treats patients in Haiti and... Read Mountains Beyond Mountains Summary

IntroductionMy Ántonia, first published in 1918, is the third novel in what reviewers sometimes refer to as “The Prairie Trilogy” or “The Great Plains Trilogy” by celebrated American author Willa Cather (1873-1947). The other two books, O Pioneers! (1913) and The Song of the Lark (1915) also feature strong female characters from immigrant families in a Great Plains setting but are otherwise unrelated. My Ántonia is considered one of Cather’s most outstanding novels for its... Read My Antonia Summary

Tobias Wolff’s novel Old School was published in 2003. It is a work of literary fiction that can also be considered a roman à clef, as it is a thinly veiled account of Wolff’s own experience in prep school. Old School was a finalist for the 2004 Pen/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics Circle Prize for Fiction.Plot SummaryOld School follows the unnamed narrator’s plight at a prestigious New England prep school in the early... Read Old School Summary

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a historical fiction novel by Ken Kesey, published in 1962. Kesey drew on his experiences working in a veterans’ hospital to develop a critique of then-current psychiatric practices. The novel’s central conflict between a domineering nurse and an unruly patient can also be read as an allegory for the emerging culture wars of the 1960s. The novel was adapted into a Broadway play one year after its publication... Read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Summary

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Our Town (1938) is a three-act play written by American playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder served in both World War I and World War II and wrote honestly about life in America. He wrote several plays but considered Our Town to be his best work. It was performed for the first time in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1938. Wilder received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Our Town, and the play is widely considered to be... Read Our Town Summary

Outcasts United: An American Town, a Refugee Team, and One Woman’s Quest to Make a Difference (2007) is the second book by former New York Times journalist Warren St. John. It follows one season with the Fugees, a soccer team for refugee boys in Clarkston, Georgia. Weaving personal stories with local and international histories, St. John demonstrates The Value of Organized Sports for Young People and the systemic injustices preventing refugees from equal participation in... Read Outcasts United Summary

Persuasion is the last novel completed by Jane Austen (1775-1817) before her death. Written between the years 1815-1816 and published posthumously, the Regency-era novel centers on the engagements and marriages of a small circle of middle-class families, with particular attention to the social and private lives of women. Echoing character dynamics found throughout Austen’s works, the romantic protagonists must confront the nature of their individual pride before fully realizing their relationship. This guide references the... Read Persuasion Summary

Kent Haruf's Plainsong was published in 1999 and addresses such powerful themes as community, acceptance and loneliness, as well as the effects of isolation on the individual. The novel focuses on several storylines and takes place in the high plains of eastern Colorado. The characters face daunting trials and tribulations, and many of their paths cross with one another. In Holt, Colorado, Tom Guthrie readies his young children, Ike and Bobby, for school and checks... Read Plainsong Summary

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking is a nonfiction book by Susan Cain, published in 2012. It is considered part of the psychology and self-help genres. The book made several bestseller lists, including those of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and National Public Radio. It also was voted the best nonfiction book of 2012 by the Goodreads Choice Awards and has been translated... Read Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking Summary

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books is a memoir by Iranian American author Azar Nafisi, first released to widespread critical and popular acclaim in 2003. The memoir recalls Nafisi’s experiences living and teaching in Iran after the 1979 revolution that created the Islamic Republic of Iran, until her eventual exile in the United States in 1997. At the center of the memoir is Nafisi’s account of a secret book club she hosted during... Read Reading Lolita in Tehran Summary

Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (2015) is a non-fiction work by Sherry Turkle. A clinical psychologist and professor of Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, Turkle specializes in human-technology interaction and has decades of experience writing on technology’s problematic effects on human connection. In Reclaiming Conversation, the book’s premise is in the title: Turkle believes that technology has detrimentally taken over human conversation and that we ought to... Read Reclaiming Conversation Summary

Jacqueline Woodson’s 2019 Red at the Bone is a work of fiction that centers on the coming together of two dissimilar families because of a teen pregnancy. Highly acclaimed and award-winning author Woodson offers a counternarrative to the familiar tale of teenage pregnancy while considering how identity intersects with class, race, sexuality, gender, and history. This study guide was created with the aid of the Riverhead Books 2019 hardback edition. Plot SummaryThe novel opens 80... Read Red at the Bone Summary

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Paul Fleischman’s multi-perspective young adult novella Seedfolks presents a modern parable for community-building over 13 chapters, each narrated by a different character in monologue. Fleischman first published the work in 1997; the 2002 HarperCollins edition, which this study guide references, includes the author’s note “From seeds to Seedfolks.” Son of children’s book writer Sid Fleischman, Paul Fleischman began his career as a writer in college. Inspired by folklore, music, and verse, Fleischman soon found success... Read Seedfolks Summary

Silver Sparrow, written by Tayari Jones and published in 2011, is a family drama set in 1980s Atlanta. The novel was a Women’s National Book Association 2011 Great Group Read and was chosen as one of the top 10 books of the year by Library Journal. Plot Summary Silver Sparrow revolves around Dana Lynn Yarboro and Chaurisse Witherspoon, who are half-sisters, although only Dana knows this.  Dana, 16, narrates the first half of the novel. Dana has... Read Silver Sparrow Summary

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So You Want to Talk About Race is a 2018 non-fiction book written by Ijeoma Oluo, an American author of Nigerian descent whose columns and news articles on race have appeared in The Guardian, The Stranger, and Jezebel, among other places. This guide refers to the first edition published in 2018 by Seal Press. The title gestures to the discourse that is necessary to combat racial oppression in the United States. The book made Bustle’s... Read So You Want to Talk About Race Summary

Published in 2014, Station Eleven is the fourth novel by Emily St. John Mandel. The book won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2015, as well as the Toronto Book Award, and was shortlisted or nominated for several others. Set in a post-apocalyptic future where a flu outbreak decimates the world’s population, the book is sometimes categorized as science fiction, although it does not feature any fictional technology; its protagonists’ dramatic involvement also qualifies it... Read Station Eleven Summary

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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is an 1876 novel by Mark Twain written for both youth and adult readers. It is a story about Tom Sawyer, a boy from the fictional town of St. Petersburg, Missouri. Tom lives a life of constant adventure, drama, self-aggrandizement, and self-inflicted woes as he comes of age. The novel is equal parts comical and poignant, dark and light, and is one of Twain’s many odes to the pleasures and... Read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Summary

American writer Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel The Age Of Innocence (1920) was a post-armistice reflection on the 1870s New York society of her youth. Wharton, an American who lived abroad in Paris, was already the successful author of other novels, including The House of Mirth (1905) and Ethan Frome (1911). In a The New York Times article, Elif Batuman reflects that “eventually, each classic tells two stories: its own, and the story of all... Read The Age of Innocence Summary

Dinaw Mengestu’s 2007 debut novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, is a NYT Notable Book, a recipient of the Guardian First Book Award, and the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Originally published in the UK under the title Children of the Revolution, the story takes place across three days in the life of Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian refugee living in Washington, DC. In his New York Times review of the book... Read The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears Summary

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics is a work of narrative nonfiction written by Daniel James Brown and published in 2013. The book became a New York Times bestseller and won several awards, including the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. The book also inspired a PBS documentary titled The Boys of ’36.Content Warning: The source material references the... Read The Boys in the Boat Summary

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The Color of Water is a nonfiction autobiography published in 1996 by the American author and musician James McBride. Subtitled A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother, The Color of Water chronicles the author’s challenges growing up in the 1960s and 1970s as a child with a white Jewish mother and Black father. Interspersed with the author’s recollections are interview transcripts describing his mother’s abusive upbringing as an Orthodox Jewish woman living in the... Read The Color of Water Summary