Vermont Reads Past Picks

Told in four parts—power, water, light, and time—”The Light Pirate” by Lily Brooks-Dalton is a meditation on the beauty and violence of an untamable wilderness. It considers the dissolution of the human-made world, and helps us see how connection, adaptability, and a little bit of magic might guide us to a new future.

We invite Vermont communities to plan projects centered around “Gather” and its themes of rural life, resilience, class differences, addiction, housing and food insecurity, a deep relationship to the land, and the power of community.

We invite Vermont communities to plan projects centered around Last Night at The Telegraph Club and its themes of self-acceptance, familial and cultural ties, US/China relations, LGBTQ+ and Feminist history, McCarthyism and xenophobia, music of the 1940s and 1950s, and others.

Vermont Reads is a statewide, one-book reading program. Communities host programs related to the book’s themes. “The Most Costly Journey” is the Vermont Reads book from July 2022 through June 2023. It’s an anthology of comics that depict the oral histories of migrant workers who traveled from southern Mexico and Central America to work on Vermont farms.

This novel in letters tells the paired stories of two very different teenage boys who are initially reluctant to participate in a pen-pal assignment from their high school English teacher, but ultimately grow well beyond the boundaries of the school project to share earth-shattering revelations about themselves and their families.

Angie Thomas’ bestselling YA novel about the Black Lives Matter movement is finding an even wider audience now than when it was first published in 2017. The powerful themes of The Hate U Give have been brought into sharper focus for millions of Americans by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbury.

March: Book One is the first of a trilogy written by civil rights icon John Lewis, in collaboration with co-writer Andrew Aydin and award-winning graphic artist Nate Powell.

Bread and Roses, Too by Katherine Paterson is a novel of historical fiction that tells the story of the 1912 “Bread and Roses” strike in the Lawrence, Massachusetts textile mills through the eyes of an Italian-American girl and a runaway boy.

This beautiful memoir of the author’s childhood, written in verse, tells the story of a young person finding her voice and examines the strength of family bonds.

In 1916, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, was imprisoned and crushed by sea ice near Antarctica.  It nearly cost his crew their lives, but all twenty-eight of them would survive.  Theirs is one of the greatest adventure and survival stories of the twentieth century.

This funny and touching story of a father and son is, at its heart, a reflection on the importance of stories, imagination, and creativity.