The City is continuing its Community Reads Program, called BI Reads, that was started from the Bainbridge Island Reads for Justice with the book Stamped. The goals for the BI Reads are to:

1. Build community on Bainbridge Island through reading one book together.
2. Promote literacy and the love of reading Island-wide and beyond.
3. Be open to all types of books that foster beneficial dialogue, creative expression, and expanded ways of thinking.

Over the next 6 months, the community will have the opportunity to vote on an option of three books (month of May) which will launch into four months of reading and special events around the top voted book from July-October.

The finalists for the BI

1. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and theTeachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
   Drawing from her experiences as an Indigenous scientist, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer demonstrated how all living things—from strawberries and witch hazel to water lilies and lichen—provide us with gifts and lessons every day in her best-selling book Braiding Sweetgrass. Adapted for young adults by Monique Gray Smith, this new edition reinforces how wider ecological understanding stems from listening to the earth’s oldest teachers: the plants around us. With informative sidebars, reflection questions, and art from illustrator Nicole Neidhardt, Braiding Sweetgrass brings Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the lessons of plant life to a new generation.
2. The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea
   In his final days, beloved and ailing patriarch Miguel Angel de La Cruz, affectionately called Big Angel, has summoned his entire clan for one last legendary birthday party. But as the party approaches, his mother, nearly one hundred, dies, transforming the weekend into a farewell doubleheader. Among the guests is Big Angel’s half brother, known as Little Angel, who must reckon with the truth that although he shares a father with his siblings, he has not, as a half gringo, shared a life. Across two bittersweet days in their San Diego neighborhood, the revelers mingle among the palm trees and cacti, celebrating the lives of Big Angel and his mother, and recounting the many inspiring tales that have passed into family lore, the acts both ordinary and heroic that brought these citizens to a fraught and sublime country and allowed them to flourish in the land they have come to call home.
3. A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
   In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace — and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox —possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.

For more information, and to vote, click here!