Welcome Readers!

Our 2026 Online Reading Challenge is … KNOW YOUR HISTORY! Each month we will be reading about a different observance month and highlighting a main title about that month.

For May, we will be reading books that reflect the heritage and stories within Asian or Pacific Islander culture to celebrate Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

Here’s a quick summary from the publisher:

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.

Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they’re dissonant—and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her.

With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer’s search to both uncover and speak the truth. – One World

Looking for some other books that commemorate the role of women in history and society? Try any of the following.

• Asian American is Not a Color: Conversations on Race, Affirmative Action, and Family by OiYan Poon
• Asian American Histories of the United States by Catherine Ceniza Choy
• Banyan Moon by Thao Thai
• Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists by Chenxing Han
• Dust Child by Pan Que Mai Nguyen
• The Family Recipe by Carolyn Huynh
• Gaysians by Mike Curato
• Girls to the Front: 40 Asian American Women Who Blazed a Trail by Nina Mata
• Going Home, Coming Home by Truong Tran
• Good Fortune by C K Chau
• The Leavers by Lisa Ko
• My Documents by Kevin Nguyen
• Wat Takes His Shot: The Life & Legacy of Basketball Hero Wataru Misaka by Cheryl Kim
• What is Yellow Peril? by Virginia Loh-Hagan

As always, check each of our locations for displays with lots more titles to choose from!