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Book: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Date: Friday, June 17th at 7pm

Summary: Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the Earth itself will perish.

Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, he realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Alone on this tiny ship that’s been cobbled together by every government and space agency on the planet and hurled into the depths of space, it’s up to him to conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

And thanks to an unexpected ally, he just might have a chance.

Part scientific mystery, part dazzling interstellar journey, Project Hail Mary is a tale of discovery, speculation, and survival to rival The Martian—while taking us to places it never dreamed of going.

Book: Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Date: Friday, May 27th at 7pm

Summary: An unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.

As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band–and meeting the man who would become her husband–her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.

Book: Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston
Date: Friday, April 29th, 7pm

Summary: Abducted from Africa, sold in America.

The compelling true story of one of the last survivors of the Atlantic Slave Trade, Barracoon recounts one man’s fight for freedom. Fifty years after the abolition of slavery, Cudjo Lewis was illegally smuggled as “Black Cargo”. He spent nearly six years in captivity before finally being emancipated.

Through a series of interviews with Zora Neale Hurston, Cudjo casts light on the circumstances of his capture and his detention in a barracoon, a holding cell for slaves, before embarking on his journey through the Middle Passage, to his arrival in the Unites States on the Alabama River.

Cudjo also sheds light upon the African culture and narrates traditional tales and games played by his men.
Barracoon brilliantly illuminates the tragedy of slavery and one life forever defined by it.