Seattle Reads

  • Read George Takei’s Graphic Memoir with the West Coast’s Biggest Book Club

    Read George Takei’s Graphic Memoir with the West Coast’s Biggest Book Club

    We have good news for Seattle readers! This spring, The Seattle Public Library invites you to take part in One Book, One Coast, a shared reading initiative connecting more than 140 library systems across California, Oregon, and Washington, including more than a dozen in Washington State alone. Organized by LA County Library, One Book, One… Continue reading

  • U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón to Visit Seattle and More Seattle Reads News

    U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón to Visit Seattle and More Seattle Reads News

    Ready, set, mark your calendars! Beginning  next week, Seattle Reads, the Library’s citywide book group, is planning more than two months of community programming for our 2025 selection “You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World,” edited by the 24th U.S. Poetry Laureate Ada Limón. There is literally a program for everyone in our city.… Continue reading

  • 2025 Seattle Reads Selection Celebrates Poetry and the Natural World

    2025 Seattle Reads Selection Celebrates Poetry and the Natural World

    We are so excited to share this year’s selection for Seattle Reads, the Library’s citywide book group: Edited by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón,  “You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World,” celebrates our deep connection with the natural world and the collective power of poetry. For the book, Limón invited 50 American poets to observe… Continue reading

  • Seattle Reads: Read Deeper

    Whether the 2024 Seattle Reads selection of Parable of the Sower was your introduction to the work of Octavia Butler or you’re a long time fan of the author, I hope you’re enjoying diving into Butler’s world of speculative fiction. Her creative and sometimes terrifying visions of the future, centering of Black experience, dreams of anti-hierarchical… Continue reading

  • Celebrating Seattle Reads and ‘Parable of the Sower’ With Performances, Panels and a Party

    The Library’s annual Seattle Reads program usually culminates with several days of events featuring the selected author and book. This year, our citywide book club is celebrating the 2024 selection, Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower,” with more than two months of performances, panels and discussions that will be held in collaboration with community organizations… Continue reading

  • Seattle Reads Turns 25 and We’re Celebrating With Julie Otsuka

    It’s hard to imagine, but back in 1998, citywide book clubs didn’t really exist. Enter Nancy Pearl and Chris Higashi, who were with the Washington Center for the Book (then affiliated with the Library). They came up with the concept of encouraging readers across a community to read the same book, and discuss it. They… Continue reading

  • Read Julie Otsuka’s “The Swimmers” With Us

    Read Julie Otsuka’s “The Swimmers” With Us

    In May of 2005, author Julie Otsuka visited Seattle as part of Seattle Reads, the Library’s citywide book group that started in 1998. Otsuka’s acclaimed debut novel, “When the Emperor Was Divine” had been chosen as the Seattle Reads selection that year. The book described in “incantatory, unsentimental prose” (The New Yorker) the experience of… Continue reading

  • ‘The Border Is Everywhere’: Luis Urrea on “The House of Broken Angels”

    ‘The Border Is Everywhere’: Luis Urrea on “The House of Broken Angels”

    Do you have your free ticket to Seattle Reads yet? On Oct. 19-20, renowned Mexican-American author Luis Alberto Urrea will visit Seattle to share his bestselling novel “The House of Broken Angels.” Urrea, who has been described as a “master storyteller with a rock and roll heart,” will appear at El Centro de la Raza’s… Continue reading

  • Discussing ‘The Vanishing Half’

    Whether you’ve read the Seattle Reads 2021 selection, The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, or it’s in your reading future, take a look at these discussion questions below to enhance your connection to the book. And you’ll also want to take a look at Moira Macdonald’s excellent interview with Brit Bennett in the Seattle Times: Brit Bennett’s… Continue reading

  • Throwback Thursday: March 31, 2008

    Seattle Reads, the arts, and gentrification was the topic in our Throwback Thursday post on March 31, 2008. If you have picked up this year’s Seattle Reads novel, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu you’ve had a chance to get one novelist’s take on some of the issues and pressures that can… Continue reading

  • Seattle Reads: An Interview with Thi Bui

    In celebration of Seattle Reads 2019, Jess Boyd spoke to Thi Bui about her award- winning graphic novel, The Best We Could Do (TBWCD), the 2019 Seattle Reads selection. _________________________________________ An Interview with Thi Bui by Jess Boyd Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do is a story that moved me, my family and my… Continue reading

  • OverDrive Comics and ‘The Best We Could Do’

    The Seattle Public Library has physical comics for children, teens, and adults available for checkout in all of our 27 locations, as well as through our mobile services. We also have comics available through our Hoopla Digital service. But did you know, amongst all of the mysteries, memoirs, and literary fiction e-books, that we also… Continue reading

  • Seattle Reads Homegoing: Fiction to Read Next

    In 2018 Seattle Reads Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. Beginning in Ghana, 1760, Homegoing follows the parallel paths of two half-sisters and seven generations of their descendants in Ghana and the United States, in a stunning saga of the African diaspora that illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy. Gyasi will be in Seattle for a series of events… Continue reading

  • Seattle Reads Homegoing: Nonfiction Titles to Delve Deeper

    In 2018 Seattle Reads Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. Beginning in Ghana, 1760, Homegoing follows the parallel paths of two half-sisters and seven generations of their descendants in Ghana and the United States in a stunning saga of the African diaspora that illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy. Gyasi will be in Seattle for a series of events… Continue reading

  • Seattle Reads 2017: A conversation with Angela Flournoy

    In 2017 Seattle Reads The Turner House by Angela Flournoy. Enjoy this interview with Flounoy conducted by Vivian Phillips. If you’d like to ask your own questions, attend any one of six author programs with Angela Flournoy from May 8-11, 2017. The Turner family could be my own or any number of families that surrounded my family during… Continue reading

  • Nonfiction to read alongside The Turner House

    In 2017 Seattle Reads The Turner House, a novel about a large African-American family set in Detroit. We hope you’ve read it, or are planning to. Perhaps it has left you wanting to know more about the Great Migration of African-Americans from the South to the North; or about the city of Detroit; about the economic… Continue reading

  • Seattle Reads The Turner House: Fiction to Read Next

    In 2017 Seattle Reads The Turner House by Angela Flournoy. Set in Detroit in 2008, post-economic crash, we meet the Turner family as the 13 adult siblings must decide what to do with their family home, worth only 1/10 of its mortgage. As we get to know three of the siblings better, we also get the… Continue reading

  • Seattle Reads: An interview with author Karen Joy Fowler

    This interview originally appeared in The American Reader. Reprinted with permission of Carmen Maria Machado for our 2016 Seattle Reads celebration featuring Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. Events with Ms. Fowler run Friday through Sunday, May 20-22, at six Seattle library locations.  Last summer, Karen Joy Fowler made me cry. On… Continue reading