Book in Common

Community Read Challenge 1

Join the Book in Common Community Read Challenge in March and read ThiBui’s The Best We Could Do in preparation for the author’s visit to campus on April 5.

To participate in the Community Read Challenge you will read The Best We Could Do in two installments, accompanied by reading prompts, resources, and event information emailed on March 20 and 27. Register to participate in book discussions on March 22 and 29 (11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. in ARTS 227). The first fifteen people to register will receive a free copy of the book!

Author Thi Bui Thi Bui, the 2022–23 Book in Common author, is a Vietnamese American cartoonist whose work seeks to make sense of the stories that history leaves behind. Bui’s debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do, is the story of her family in the years before, during, and after the Vietnam War. It was selected for an American Book Award, a National Book Critics Circle finalist, and was an Eisner Award finalist. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen describes Bui’s memoir as “a book to break your heart and heal it.”

For Challenge 1, by March 20

  1. Get your copy of The Best We Could Do.
  2. Get your ticket for the Book in Common lecture by Thi Bui, Wednesday, April 5 at 7:30 p.m. at Laxson Auditorium ($20 for the general public, free for Chico State and Butte College students).
  3. Watch a recorded fall ’22 Book in Common talk featuring: “HMoob Studies in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies,” panel discussion with Assistant Professor Choua Xiong (Chico State), PhD student Mai Neng Vang (UW Madison), and Lecturer Chong A. Moua (UW Madison).

 “‘The Best ‘We’ Could Do’: Memory, Genocide, and the Ethics of Identity,” with Professor Jonathan H. X. Lee (San Francisco State). Learn more about the historical context of Bui’s memoir—the Vietnam War and its aftermath—by attending a free University Film Series screening of Boat People (1982), introduced by Professor William Nitzky (Anthropology), on March 6 at 6:00 p.m. in AYRS 106.

Consider participating in the “Meanings of Home” art exhibition (April 4–14, to coincide with the author’s visit to campus). To participate, pick up a template and instructions from locations across campus, and return completed art by March 21.

Clint Smith is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellerHow the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America(opens in new window), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2021. Clint Smith has also written two books of poetry, both nominated as finalists for an NAACP Image Award—the New York Times bestselling collection Above Ground and Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic.