Past Years’ Reads
Click cover for archived content from this Community Read.
Click cover for archived content from this Community Read.
Click cover for archived content from this Community Read.
Born a Crime
2022-2023
“A gritty memoir…studded with insight and provocative social criticism…with flashes of brilliant storytelling and acute observations.
—Kirkus Reviews
Nomadland
2021-2022
“At once wonderfully humane and deeply troubling, the book offers an eye-opening tour of the increasingly unequal, unstable, and insecure future our country is racing toward.” — Astra Taylor, The Nation
Underland
2020-2021
“Macfarlane’s significant contribution to an emerging canon of popular ecological writing is to articulate how the ground beneath our feet is not an immutable foundation, indifferent to human dominion. Far from it. Whether through the gouging work of multinational corporations, or as an insidious consequence of pollution (and the two are connected), the reach of human activity now extends, more pervasively than ever, into the mineral plane.” —Rebecca Griggs, The Atlantic
Maus
2019-2020
"Maus is a book that cannot be put down, truly, even to sleep. When two of the mice speak of love, you are moved, when they suffer, you weep. . . . . when you finish Maus, you are unhappy to have left that magical world." —Umberto Eco
Everything I Never told You
2018-2019
“Wonderfully moving . . . A beautifully crafted study of dysfunction and grief . . [that] will resonate with anyone who has every had a family drama.” —The Boston Globe
The Girls of atomic city
2017-2018
“Kiernan has amassed a deep reservoir of intimate details of what life was like for women living in the secret city...Rosie, it turns out, did much more than drive rivets.” —The Washington Post
Our Kids
2016-2017
“An insightful book that paints a disturbing picture of the collapse of the working class and the growth of an upper class that seems to be largely unaware of the other’s precarious existence.” — Kirkus Reviews
I am Malala
2015-2016
""Malala Yousafzai [is] an international symbol of inspiration and bravery, but her survival instilled educators with courage-and is slowly helping make Pakistani schools safer.” — ABC.com
The New Jim Crow
2014-2015
"Now and then a book comes along that might in time touch the public and educate social commentators, policymakers, and politicians about a glaring wrong that we have been living with that we also somehow don't know how to face. The New Jim Crow is such a work" — The New York Review of Books
Fahrenheit 451
2013-2014
Brilliant . . . Startling and ingenious . . . Mr. Bradbury’s account of this insane world, which bears many alarming resemblances to our own, is fascinating.” —Orville Prescott, The New York Times