In a twist on the traditional book club, Little Free Library’s Action Book Club™ invites participants to read books on timely topics and take part in meaningful—and fun—service projects to benefit their communities. This is reading and social engagement at its best.
During COVID-19, this book club allows Parkites to read together, with their household, or by themselves. The service projects can be done together or alone.
The Park City Library’s Action Book Club theme changes each season. Each theme celebrates the joy of reading and the power of literacy.
This book club initiative is supported by the American Library Association’s Libraries Transform Communities grant.
Action Book Club is easy to participate in. Review the theme, choose a book to read, and take an action or attend a library event. If something doesn’t appeal to you, find a book that would work better and brainstorm an action that would bring unity to Park City or your neighborhood.
Spring Theme: Many Voices
Celebrate diversity, our differences and the similarities that connect us all from March to May.
Step 1: Read a Book
Select a book to read from the recommended list or choose one of your own.
Step 2: Take Action
Pick up an “action bag” from the Library, participate in a library event, or choose your own action.
Taking Action
Between March and May, the Park City Library offers these free action bags or library events to attend to bring unity to Park City or your neighborhood. What will you decide to do to celebrate the many voices of Park City?
Mask Action Bag: March 2nd, all day via curbside pickup
Express your unique voice by artistically showing what makes you – YOU – by decorating a mask that shows who you are.
Banner Action Bag: April 6th, all day via curbside pickup
Create a banner for your fence or balcony to celebrate your voice by spreading a message that connects us all.
Todd Parr Virtual Author Event: April 21st, 11am
Kindness and empathy remain at the forefront of Todd’s books, which contain many voices. His books soon become family favorites. Park City Librarians love any Todd Parr book, but we recommend It’s Okay to Be Different to start with. View this event live on Facebook or through Zoom.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5301248466?pwd=b3V6RUJpd1ZDQnNvZE9pOG5xU3dGUT09
Meeting ID: 530 124 8466
Password: Books2020
Library Field Clean Up: May 4th, 4pm
We connect on the Library Field through dogs, sledding, and more. Come together to clean up after the spring melt.
May Day Basket Action Bag: May 4th, all day via curbside pickup
Connect with someone by gifting them a May Day basket that will make them feel connected to their community.
Reading Recommendations for Adults
Call it a recession novel, or an immigrant tale — both are true. In 2007, Manhattan-based Cameroonian immigrant Jende Jonga gets a job chauffeuring for Lehman Brothers executive Clark Edwards, easing the financial strain on his family. At first, all goes well, but problems in the Edwards’ marriage lead to problems for the Jongas, and when Lehman falls, both families are caught up in the terrible aftermath.
Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show, shares his remarkable story of growing up in South Africa, with a black South African mother and a white European father at a time when it was against the law for a mixed-race child like him to exist. In a country where racism barred blacks from social, educational, and economic opportunity, Trevor surmounted staggering obstacles and created a promising future for himself, thanks to his mother’s unwavering love and indomitable will.
When his mother, a tribal enrollment specialist living on a reservation in North Dakota, slips into an abyss of depression after being brutally attacked, fourteen-year-old Joe Coutz sets out with his three friends to find the person that destroyed his family.
Ruth Jefferson is a labor and delivery nurse at a Connecticut hospital with more than twenty years’ experience. During her shift, Ruth begins a routine checkup on a newborn, only to be told a few minutes later that she’s been reassigned to another patient. The parents are white supremacists and don’t want Ruth, who is African American, to touch their child. The hospital complies with their request, but the next day, the baby goes into cardiac distress while Ruth is alone in the nursery. Does she obey orders or does she intervene? Ruth hesitates before performing CPR and, as a result, is charged with a serious crime. Kennedy McQuarrie, a white public defender, takes her case but gives unexpected advice: Kennedy insists that mentioning race in the courtroom is not a winning strategy. Conflicted by Kennedy’s counsel, Ruth tries to keep life as normal as possible for her family–especially her teenage son–as the case becomes a media sensation. As the trial moves forward, Ruth and Kennedy must gain each other’s trust, and come to see that what they’ve been taught their whole lives about others–and themselves–might be wrong. With incredible empathy, intelligence, and candor, Jodi Picoult tackles race, privilege, prejudice, justice, and compassion–and doesn’t offer easy answers. Small Great Things is a remarkable achievement from a writer at the top of her game.
This Is the Plate: Utah Food Traditions By Carol Edison, Eric A. Eliason, Lynne S McNeill
The first book-length treatment of Utah’s distinctive food heritage, this volume contains work by more than sixty subject-matter experts, including scholars, community members, event organizers, journalists, bloggers, photographers, and food producers. It features recipes and photographs of food and beverages. Utah’s food history is traced from precontact Native American times through the arrival of multinational Mormon pioneers, miners, farmers, and other immigrants to today’s moment of “foodie” creativity, craft beers, and “fast-casual” restaurant-chain development. Contributors also explore the historical and cultural background for scores of food-related tools, techniques, dishes, traditions, festivals, and distinctive ingredients from the state’s religious, regional, and ethnic communities as well as Utah-based companies. In a state much influenced by Latter-day Saint history and culture, iconic items like Jell-O salads, funeral potatoes, fry sauce, and the distinctive “Utah scone” have emerged as self-conscious signals of an ecumenical Utah identity. Scholarly but lively and accessible, this book will appeal to both the general reader and the academic folklorist.
In the Country We Love: My Family Divided by Diane Guerrero and Michelle Burford
Diane Guerrero, the television actress from the megahit Orange is the New Black and Jane the Virgin, was just fourteen years old on the day her parents and brother were arrested and deported to Colombia while she was at school. Born in the U.S., Guerrero was able to remain in the country and continue her education, depending on the kindness of family friends who took her in and helped her build a life and a successful acting career for herself, without the support system of her family. In the Country We Love is a moving, heartbreaking story of one woman’s extraordinary resilience in the face of the nightmarish struggles of undocumented residents in this country. There are over 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US, many of whom have citizen children, whose lives here are just as precarious, and whose stories haven’t been told. Written with Michelle Burford, this memoir is a tale of personal triumph that also casts a much-needed light on the fears that haunt the daily existence of families likes the author’s and on a system that fails them over and over.
Reading Recommendations for Teens
Congressman John Lewis, one of the key figures of the civil rights movement, joins co-writer Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell to bring the lessons of history to vivid life for a new generation, urgently relevant for today’s world.
Recommended for grades 7-12.
Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.
Recommended for grades 7-10.
Alternates three interrelated stories about the problems of young Chinese Americans trying to participate in the popular culture.
Recommended for grades 7-12.
For fans of inspirational nonfiction, here is a full-color book inspired by the powerful documentary film Girl Rising about educating girls across the globe.
Recommended for grades 10-12.
After witnessing her friend’s death at the hands of a police officer, Starr Carter’s life is complicated when the police and a local drug lord try to intimidate her in an effort to learn what happened the night Kahlil died.
Recommended for grades 9-12.
Separated from her detained mother after moving from Haiti to America, Fabiola struggles to navigate the home of her loud cousins and a new school on Detroit’s gritty west side, where a surprising romance and a dangerous proposition challenge her ideas about freedom.
Recommended for grades 9-12.
Recommended Reads for Youth
From basketball dreams and family fiascos to first crushes and new neighborhoods, this anthology, written by award-winning children’s authors, celebrates the uniqueness and universality in all of us.
Recommended for grades 4-6.
Amina, a Pakistani-American Muslim girl, struggles to stay true to her family’s culture while dealing with the vandalism of the local Islamic Center and mosque and her best friend Soojin’s new friendship with their former nemesis.
Recommended for grades 4-6.
In vivid poems that reflect the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, an award-winning author shares what it was like to grow up in the 1960s and 1970s in both the North and the South.
Recommended for grades 4-7.
In 1969 twelve-year-old Mimi and her family move to an all-white town in Vermont, where Mimi’s mixed-race background and interest in “boyish” topics like astronomy make her feel like an outsider.
Recommended for grades 4-8.
Ghost, a naturally talented runner and troublemaker, is recruited for an elite middle school track team. He must stay on track, literally and figuratively, to reach his full potential.
Recommended for grades 5-8.
Twelve-year-old Maraia Luisa O’Neill-Morales reluctantly moves with her Mexican-American mother to Chicago and starts seventh grade with a bang–violating the dress code with her punk rock aesthetic and spurning the middle school’s most popular girl in favor of starting a band with a group of like-minded weirdos.
Recommended for grades 3-6.
Recommendations for Children
Illustrations and brief text describe all kinds of differences that are “okay,” such as “It’s Okay to be a different color,” “It’s Okay to need some help,” “It’s Okay to be adopted,” and “It’s Okay to have a Different nose.”
Recommended for grades Pre-K-2.
Three children from other countries (Somalia, Guatemala, and Korea) struggle to adjust to their new home and school in the United States.
Recommended for grades K-2.
Now that she is ten, Lailah is delighted that she can fast during the month of Ramadan like her family and her friends in Abu Dhabi, but finding a way to explain to her teacher and classmates in Atlanta is a challenge until she gets some good advice fromthe librarian, Mrs. Scrabble.
Recommended for grades K-3.
A rope passed down through the generations frames an African American family’s story as they journey north during the time of the Great Migration.
Recommended for grades K-3.
Augie enjoys the company of his dog, Daisy, and using his imagination, but painfully endures the taunts of his peers because of his facial deformity.
Recommended for grades Pre-K-2.
As a young boy, Bao Phi awoke early, hours before his father’s long workday began, to fish on the shores of a small pond in Minneapolis. Unlike many other anglers, Bao and his father fished for food, not recreation. Between hope-filled casts, Bao’s father told him about a different pond in their homeland of Vietnam.
Recommended for grades K-2.