Dormont Reads - Spring 2024

Beyond Bedtime Books and DCDC are proud to return with the second Dormont Reads -- a spring reading battle! 

First, get your team together! Find up to 5 local book nerds and sign up by clicking below!

As soon as you've registered, get reading!  You can find the books however you wish - stop by a local bookshop, visit the Library, buy a set of books and share amongst your team.   

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - Sci-Fi

From Goodreads: Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.

Happy Place by Emily Henry - Romance

From Goodreads: Harriet and Wyn have been the perfect couple since they met in college—they go together like salt and pepper, honey and tea, lobster and rolls. Except, now—for reasons they’re still not discussing—they don’t. They broke up six months ago. And still haven’t told their best friends. Which is how they find themselves sharing the largest bedroom at the Maine cottage that has been their friend group’s yearly getaway for the last decade. ...After years of being in love, how hard can it be to fake it for one week… in front of those who know you best?

None of This is True by Lisa Jewell - Triller

From Goodreads: Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summers crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie’s life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can’t quite resist the temptation to keep making the podcast about her. Slowly she starts to realise that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it, Josie has inveigled her way into Alix’s life—and into her home. But, as quickly as she arrived, Josie disappears. Only then does Alix discover that Josie has left a terrible and terrifying legacy in her wake, and that Alix has become the subject of her own true crime podcast, with her life and her family’s lives under mortal threat.

Crying in H-Mart by Michelle Zauner - Memoir

From Goodreads: Michelle Zauner tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band—and meeting the man who would become her husband—her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride - Historical Fiction

From Goodreads: In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighbourhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. As these characters' stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town's white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community-heaven and earth-that sustain us.

You have all spring to read -- remember, you're working as a team, so split them up in a way that works best for you!  Do your best to read them all and remember as many details as you can. 

On May 4th, join us at a local spot in Dormont (location is TBD) for an evening of drinks, snacks and a good old-fashioned book quiz!  We'll do a few rounds of questions based on all of the books to see who studied the hardest over the summer.   Prizes for the winner to be announced.