Welcome Readers!
New year means new reading challenge! I’m so excited to tell you that the theme for the 2025 Online Reading Challenge is … GENRES! Each month we will be reading a different genre. I will pick a main title for us to read together if you would like, but feel free to read anything set in that genre for the month! I can’t wait to start reading with you all.
This month the online reading challenge genre is literary fiction. What is literary fiction? According to NoveList, a readers’ advisory resource that you can access through the Davenport Public Library, literary fiction is character-driven, usually involves social commentary, uses stylish writing language, and can sometimes have ambiguous endings. The plot is not the main focus in literary fiction, which allows writers to instead place their energies on the language used and character development.
Our main title for January is On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. Here’s a quick summary from the publisher:
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.
With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years. – Penguin Books
Looking for some other books that are literary fiction? Try any of the following.
- A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
- Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
- Shuggie Bain by Stuart Douglas
- The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
- The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd
- The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
As always, check each of our locations for displays with lots more titles to choose from!