OFPL Book Club

We READ, We TALK Book Club

OFPL hosts a quarterly book club to share intellectual thoughts and passionate discussions about a common book selection.

The We READ, We TALK Book Club is currently reading Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. Discussions will be held in September via Zoom or in person at the Main Library.

REGISTER for a copy of Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez (while supplies last).

Return to Programs HERE

Current Selection:

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

Winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.

Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new “emancipation” bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a “termination” that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans “for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run”?

READ MORE

Previous Book Club Selections:

Shutter

by Ramona Emerson

This blood-chilling debut set in New Mexico’s Navajo Nation is equal parts gripping crime thriller, supernatural horror, and poignant portrayal of coming of age on the reservation.

READ MORE

A Place of Thin Veil

by Bob Rosebrough

Gallup, New Mexico, is a place like no other. It is disproportionally and simultaneously wonderful and terrible. It is a place of constant struggle, where the forces of good and evil collide. The former frontier mining town, bordering the Navajo Nation at the far western edge of New Mexico, is one of those few places on earth that have the power to change the course of our lives and transform us deeply.

READ MORE

Sankofa

by Chibundu Onuzo

Anna is at a stage of her life when she’s beginning to wonder who she really is. She has separated from her husband, her daughter is all grown up, and her mother—the only parent who raised her—is dead.

READ MORE

All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

By Bryn Greenwood

As the daughter of a meth dealer, Wavy knows not to trust people, not even her own parents. Struggling to raise her little brother, eight-year-old Wavy is the only responsible “adult” around.

READ MORE

This Tender Land

By William Kent Krueger

In the summer of 1932, on the banks of Minnesota’s Gilead River, the Lincoln Indian Training School is a pitiless place where Native American children, forcibly separated from their parents, are sent to be educated. It is also home to Odie O’Banion, a lively orphan boy whose exploits constantly earn him the superintendent’s wrath. Odie and his brother, Albert, are the only white faces among the hundreds of Native American children at the school.

READ MORE

Reservation Restless

By Jim Kristofic

In the powerful and haunting lands of the Southwest, rainbows grow unexpectedly from the sky, mountain lions roam the desert, and summer storms roll over the Colorado River. As a park ranger, Kristofic explores the Ganado valley, traces the paths of the Anasazi, and finds mythic experiences on sacred mountains that explain the pain and loss promised for every person who decides to love. After reconnecting with his Navajo sister and brother, Kristofic must confront his own nightmares of the Anglo society and the future it has created. When the possible deaths of his mentor and of the American future loom before him, Kristofic must find some new way to live in the world and strike some restless path that will lead back to hózhó–a beautiful harmony.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

By Robin Wall Kimmerer

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings―asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass

READ MORE

Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation

By Michael Powell

Deep in the heart of northern Arizona, in a small and isolated patch of the vast 17.5-million-acre Navajo reservation, sits Chinle High School. Here, basketball is a passion, passed from grandparent to parent to child.

READ MORE

The Only Good Indians

By Stephen Graham Jones

A tale of revenge, cultural identity, and the cost of breaking from tradition in this latest novel from the Jordan Peele of horror literature, Stephen Graham Jones.

The Only Good Indians follow four American Indian men after a disturbing event from their youth puts them in a desperate struggle for their lives. Tracked by an entity bent on revenge, these childhood friends are helpless as the culture and traditions they left behind to catch up to them in a violent, vengeful way.

Trail of Lightning

By Rebecca Roanhorse

While most of the world has drowned beneath the sudden rising waters of a climate apocalypse, Dinétah (formerly the Navajo reservation) has been reborn. The gods and heroes of legend walk the land, but so do monsters.

Maggie Hoskie is a Dinétah monster hunter, a supernaturally gifted killer. When a small town needs help finding a missing girl, Maggie is their last—and best—hope.

READ MORE

Heart Berries

By Terese Marie Mailhot

Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman’s coming of age on the Seabird Island Band in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder.

READ MORE

The Library Book

By Susan Orleans

On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm.

READ MORE

Published: August 1976

The Woman Warrior

By Maxine Hong Kingston

A Chinese American woman tells of the Chinese myths, family stories, and events of her California childhood that have shaped her identity.

READ MORE

Published: March 2018

House of Broken Angels

By Luis Alberto Urrea

The definitive Mexican-American immigrant story, a sprawling and deeply felt portrait of a Mexican-American family occasioned by the impending loss of its patriarch, from one of the country’s most beloved authors.

READ MORE

Published: August 2018

Where the Crawdads Sing

By Delia Owens

For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl.

READ MORE

Published: June 2018

There There

By Tommy Orange

We all came to the powwow for different reasons. The messy, dangling threads of our lives got pulled into a braid–tied to the back of everything we’d been doing all along to get us here.

READ MORE

Published: April 2017

Killers of the Flower Moon

By David Grann

In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.

READ MORE

Published: April 2018

Cave of Bones

By Anne Hillerman

New York Times bestselling author Anne Hillerman brings together modern mystery, Navajo traditions, and the evocative landscape of the desert Southwest in this intriguing entry in the Leaphorn, Chee, and Manuelito series.

READ MORE

Return to Programs HERE.