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UChicago Library Diverse Books and Open Conversations

The University of Chicago Library's Diverse Books & Open Conversations series brings together undergraduate students, graduate/professional students, faculty, staff, alumni, and local community members to read the same book and engage in dialogue. We aim for this reading group to foster engagement in critical conversations around diversity and inclusion, and strive to enhance the campus climate and build community through a shared experience.

Open to all, we collectively select a book to read and meet to discuss in the Autumn, Winter, and Spring quarters. Meetings are held either virtually or in-person, depending on current public health guidelines and University policies.

You've voted and our next read is...

The Loneliest Americans by Jay Caspian Kang.

This is the unforgettable story of Kang and his family as they move from a housing project in Cambridge to an idyllic college town in the South and eventually to the West Coast. Their story unfolds against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding Asian America, as millions more immigrants, many of them working-class or undocumented, stream into the country. At the same time, upwardly mobile urban professionals have struggled to reconcile their parents’ assimilationist goals with membership in a multicultural elite—all while trying to carve out a new kind of belonging for their own children, who are neither white nor truly “people of color.”