EventsOne Village, One Book

This event has already occurred.

One Village, One Book

6:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Montclair Branch

Description

Our book club meets monthly at the library to discuss books set in Oakland and the Bay Area or by Bay Area authors. We select our books from a variety of genres and eras so you’re sure to find something you’re interested in. We’ll get to learn more about our city, meet some neighbors and discuss what we’ve read.

Meetings are the second Tuesday of the month from 6:30-7:30pm. Come to one discussion, a few or all of them! No pre-registration or commitment is required – all we ask is that you’ve read the book and are ready to discuss it.

Here’s our 2025 schedule:

  • January 14, 2025: The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan (non-fiction)
    Follow Tan’s journey as she learns to identify and draw birds, chronicling their lives and personalities along the way. Although Tan lives in Marin, you’ll spot many of these same birds in Oakland parks and yards, too. Plus, our Tuesday Night Art Club will be drawing birds January 21 if you want to try drawing your own birds!
  • February 11, 2025: Lunar New Year Love Story by Gene Luen Yang and LeUyen Phan (YA graphic novel)
    One of our goals this year is to read books that are nourishing and uplifting, and reviews call this graphic novel set in Oakland Chinatown “heartwarming,” “satisfying, sweet and moving.”
  • March 11, 2025: Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter (non-fiction)
    Follow Carpenter’s adventures and misadventures as she tries urban farming in Oakland.
  • April 8, 2025: Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart by Alice Walker (poetry)
    Poems (some of them about Oakland) for National Poetry Month, by acclaimed author Alice Walker.
  • May 13, 2025: Holding Pattern by Jenny Xie (fiction)
    Reviewers call this book, about a daughter returning to Oakland to live with her mother, “a hopeful novel about immigration and belonging, mother-daughter relationships, and the many ways we learn to hold each other.”
  • June 10, 2025: One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia (children’s fiction)
    We don’t usually do middle grade novels, but this is a quintessentially Oakland book, featuring three sisters who travel from Brooklyn to Oakland in the summer of 1968 to visit their mother. One review describes it as “The Penderwicks meet the Black Panthers.”
  • July 8, 2025: Over Easy by Mimi Pond (graphic novel)
    “A fast-paced semi-memoir about diners, drugs and California in the 1970s” set in Oakland at a Mamas’s Royal Cafe-type diner.
  • August 12, 2025: Hella Town by Mitchell Schwarzer (non-fiction)
    This book discusses “the ways transportation networks, housing, industry, commerce and civic and park projects shaped a social and political terrain” in Oakland.
  • September 9, 2025: Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange (fiction)
    We can’t promise it won’t be heartbreaking, but we have to find out what happens after the ending of There There, which we read in 2024. With an eye towards our goal of reading comforting reads this year, if anyone feels overwhelmed by Wandering Stars, our alternate read this month is Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer – we’ll discuss aspects of both books or even how they might overlap or differ, if anyone has read both.
  • October 14, 2025: The Epic Crush of Genie Lo (YA)
    East Bay teen Genie Lo is an overachiever focused on acing the SATs and getting into an Ivy League school, until she discovers she’s destined to fight demons straight out of Chinese folklore to save the Bay Area and the universe.
  • November 11, 2025: Paper is White by Hilary Zaid (fiction)
    Before she can marry her girlfriend, oral historian Ellen feels she must track down the history of her wily Holocaust survivor grandmother. “Set in ebullient, 1990s dot-com era SF, Paper is White is a novel about the gravitational pull of the past and the words we must find to make ourselves whole.”
  • December 9, 2025: Flavors of Oakland (non-fiction)
    We choose a literally nourishing book to close out the year, packed with recipes from Oakland citizens and their stories. We’re hoping to turn this meeting into a potluck with foods from the book – stay tuned for details!
Suitable for:
Adults
Teens
Type:
Book Club
Language:
English

Powered by BiblioCommons.

BiblioEvents: app01 Version 3.10.2 Last updated 2024/10/22 11:29

Image Built on: October 22, 2024 1:02 PM