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hoopla Book Club Summer Spotlight

The hoopla Book Club’s Spotlight Selection for summer 2021 has been revealed! Our choice for this quarter is Learning to Speak Southern, the second novel from Lindsey Rogers Cook. Part love letter to the city of Memphis, the story follows Lex as she returns to her hometown following a personal tragedy and discovers a chance to get to know her late mother. We think library patrons and book club participants will find this novel to be a deep, moving experience that will be a highlight of the summer. With the eBook and audiobook included in the hoopla Instant collection, readers and listeners can check out and enjoy the book simultaneously, with no holds and no waiting.

We invite you and your patrons to read along with us! Share your thoughts on social media with the hashtag #hooplabookclub, and tag us @hoopladigital. You can visit the hoopla Resource Center for assets to help you spread the word, and the hoopla Book Club Hub for materials to use with your club, including an exclusive author Q&A, discussion guide, recommended next reads, and more.

New Year, New Spotlight!

What better way to kick off a new year than with a new book? The hoopla Book Club’s first Spotlight Selection of 2021 is Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. Adapted from a stage play also written by the author, this book tells the tale of a charming little café where time travel is possible—under a set of rules, of course! Readers and listeners will follow four travelers as they venture into the past and future. Publishers Weekly calls it “an affecting, deeply immersive journey,” and we think your patrons and Book Club members will agree.

 You can visit the hoopla Resource Center to find materials to promote and use for your book club, including a discussion guide, author Q&A, other reading recommendations, and more. And it’s easy to host your book club on social media—just use the hashtag #hooplabookclub, and tag us @hoopladigital. Happy reading!

hoopla Book Club Fall Spotlight Selection

We are so pleased to announce hoopla Book Club’s choice for the final three months of 2020! This time around our Spotlight Selection is The Fixed Stars by Molly Wizenberg. Bestselling memoirist Wizenberg recounts a tale of identity through the lens of her own complex sexuality and evolving relationships. Author Emma Straub calls it “both brave and sexy, both heady and bodily…a truly compelling look at sexuality, marriage, and parenthood in this century.” We believe you and your patrons will be moved and enlightened by it, and find much that is worthy of thought and discussion.

Visit the hoopla Resource Center for plenty of resources to promote and use in your book club, including more on why we love The Fixed Stars, a discussion guide about the book, additional selections for a variety of readers, and more. Whether your club meets in person or online (or a mixture of the two), it’s easy to have book discussions on social media—use the hashtag #hooplabookclub, and feel free to include us @hoopladigital.

hoopla Book Club Summer Spotlight Selection

It’s July, and that means it’s time for a new Spotlight Selection for the hoopla Book Club! Our choice for the summer quarter is The Bear by Andrew Krivak, a National Book Award finalist for his 2011 novel, The Sojourn. The Bear is a post-apocalyptic novel, at least in that it opens at a time when humanity is down to just two people on Earth, but it is not the expected dystopia that label would suggest. Readers and listeners will find this book to be unique, peaceful, reflective, and rewarding.

Visit the hoopla Book Club Hub for plenty of resources for your book club, including more on why we love The Bear, an exclusive Q&A with author Andrew Krivak, additional selections for a variety of readers, and more. And with in-person meetings difficult at the moment due to COVID-19, it’s easy to have book discussions on social media—use the hashtag #hooplabookclub, and feel free to include us @hoopladigital. We can’t wait to hear what you and your patrons think of The Bear.

Happy reading!

Introducing the Graphic Novel Book Club!

hoopla is excited to announce the first-ever edition of the Graphic Novel Book Club! Taking a page from the popularity of our regular Book Club, the Graphic Novel Book Club is designed to engage patrons of all ages, just in time for summer reading. Our Spotlight Selection is Runaways Vol. 1: Pride & Joy, written by Brian K. Vaughan and with artwork by Adrian Alphona. This acclaimed graphic novel follows six teens as they discover their parents are super-villains and strive to turn the tables. You’ll find the assets you need to spread the word on our Resource Center, and more Graphic Novel Book Club info on our Book Club Hub, including four additional recommended titles. We hope you and your patrons will read along with us, and share your thoughts on social media with #hooplaGNBC!

Our New hoopla Book Club Spotlight Selection

The new Spotlight Selection is now live for the hoopla Book Club! Our choice for Spring 2020 is The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai. Known for her poetry and journalism, this is her first novel in English. A beautiful and haunting tale of the Trần family, it explores the Vietnam War and other historical events and how their effects ripple across generations. The Mountains Sing is available now in both eBook and audiobook, so your book club members can all borrow and enjoy the book in the format of their choice.

With social distancing measures in place and many libraries closed, it may seem like a challenging time to hold a book club. Librarians are coming up with creative new ways to engage with their patrons and communities, and we’re happy to be a small part of that. hoopla makes it easy to manage your book club remotely, with resources including a discussion guide and an author Q&A available on our Book Club Hub. Members can take place in online discussion using the hashtag #hooplabookclub, and you can use a custom hashtag for your library’s own group if you like. We have promotional materials on our Resource Center that you can use on your social media outlets to let patrons know about the new Spotlight Selection and encourage them to participate.

Include us in your discussions @hoopladigital—we would love to hear what you and your patrons think about the book, as well as any creative ways you think of to meet and keep in touch remotely. Happy reading!

Our Next hoopla Book Club Spotlight Selection

We hope everyone had a wonderful holiday week! Even with both Canada Day and Independence Day behind us now, though, there’s still plenty of summer adventure on the horizon, and hoopla is the perfect companion!

What could be better in the summer than spending some time with a good book in the beautiful weather outside, or coming in where it’s cool to discuss it? We have everything you need for a great summer book club with the announcement of our second spotlight title: Tangerine by Christine Mangan. Available in both audiobook and eBook, this suspenseful novel tells the story of a tormented friendship set against the backdrop of Tangier in the 1950s. Our own Tara Carberry says of the novel, “…the feelings of possibility and menace [Mangan] evokes create a powerful mood that I can only describe as stylishly cinematic.” If that sounds like something that would be up your patrons’ alley, visit theclub.hoopladigital.com today for plenty of book club resources, including an author Q&A and a discussion guide. There you’ll also find a number of other suitable selections across a variety of genres if you and your patrons would prefer something a little different, or for anyone who just can’t put Tangerine down and is ready to move on to something else.

Comic-Con International in San Diego is always a big summer event for a number of pop culture properties, and it’s coming up in just a couple of weeks. In addition to big panels on such popular titles as The Walking Dead and Doctor Who, the convention will also feature the announcement of this year’s Eisner Award winners, honoring the best of the past year in comics and graphic novels. In the meantime, your comics-loving patrons can find quite a selection of nominees for the awards. There are also comic and eBook tie-ins to summer blockbusters like Deadpool 2, Solo: A Star Wars Story, Ant-Man and the Wasp, The Incredibles 2, and more.

Send hoopla along with your patrons on all their summer adventures this year and keep them connected to your library 24/7. Whether it’s the perfect summer party playlist, an audiobook for a long car ride, or a couple of movies for a rainy day at the beach, there’s always something for everyone on hoopla.

Ten Questions with Lisa Ko

We hope you and your patrons are loving hoopla’s Book Club! If you haven’t gotten in on the fun just yet, there’s still time to dive into our premiere selection, The Leavers by Lisa Ko. To whet your appetite, here’s a Q&A the author was kind enough to participate in with us.

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hoopla digital: The Leavers, your debut novel, has been published for about a year and has received prestigious awards and widespread acclaim. After working on the novel for seven years, what has the last year been like for you?

Lisa Ko: It’s been an incredible experience to have people reading The Leavers. When you work on a novel for so long, you’re doing the writing alone, obsessing over it in your head, and when you publish it, you release it out into the world to share with others. I’ve been fortunate to connect with readers online and in person, both in the U.S. and abroad.

hoopla digital: We know that the story of The Leavers was inspired by a news article you read of a woman from China who becomes ensnared in the immigration system and her son who had been adopted to a Canadian family. What was it about this particular headline that was so powerful for you?

Lisa Ko: As the child of immigrants myself, the article, and others like it, said so much to me about identity and assimilation in the U.S.; who gets to be American and shy; and the links between the prison industrial complex and the criminalization of immigrants.

hoopla digital: Can you tell us about the process of writing this book? What was your research like?

Lisa Ko: I did a large amount of reading and interviewing in my research, including traveling to China to visit Polly’s hometown. The novel began as Polly’s story—and I knew going in that I would have the characters of a mother and a son and they would be separated—but I started writing Deming’s story when I found myself wondering what it would have been like for him to be raised in his adoptive, all-white community. The book started to come together when I realized it was less about the external circumstances that impact my characters and more about their internal journeys: their search for family, home, and belonging.

hoopla digital: Can you tell us about your decision to write Polly’s story in first person, while Deming’s is written in third; does Polly create a “time capsule” for Deming?

Lisa Ko: It took me several drafts to figure out the best way to tell the story. I wrote it with two first-person narrators, two-third person narrators, past tense, present tense. But when I started writing Polly in the first person, addressing her son as “you,” something clicked. It gave her story a more intimate, testimonial quality, where Deming finds out about what happened to her at the same time that the reader does.

hoopla digital: What was the hardest scene for you to write in The Leavers?

Lisa Ko: The scene where Deming and Polly reunite, for its emotional as well as structural weight in the book.

hoopla digital: For some of your readers, I’d say your book was particularly powerful in that it connects them to a specific community that they may encounter on a surface level all the time, perhaps while at a nail salon with a nail technician like Polly, who might otherwise be underrepresented. Can you talk about the issues of responsibility and representation that you had to deal with in creating these characters and telling their stories?

Lisa Ko: Absolutely. I was conscious of the responsibility you have when you’re a writer writing about an experience that isn’t yours, and I wanted to do the work to treat these experiences with respect. For me, that meant reading and listening to the stories of immigrants and transracial Asian adoptees and researching things like nail salon working conditions and for-profit immigration prisons, and then using this research in creating characters that feel fully human.

hoopla digital: If you had to name one central impetus that drives you to write fiction, what would it be?

Lisa Ko: I want to write the books and stories that I want to read.

hoopla digital: What authors would you say influenced you in writing The Leavers? What are you reading now?

Lisa Ko: The novels of Toni Morrison, Junot Diaz, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie were influences in writing The Leavers. And I’ve been reading Sesshu Foster’s new poetry collection City of the Future.

hoopla digital: What will we be reading next from you? Anything on the horizon you can share?

Lisa Ko: I’ve been busy with book tour events, but hope to start working on some new writing soon.

hoopla digital: If you could pose one discussion question to hoopla Book Club Hub members, what would that be?

Lisa Ko: What character(s) did you identify with the most in the novel, and why?

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Find this Q&A and more Book Club resources on Lisa Ko’s The Leavers at theclub.hoopladigital.com!

Introducing the hoopla Book Club

Books clubs can be a wonderful element of a library’s programming. What’s more quintessential to a library’s image than a group of people getting together to discuss their latest read? At the same time, as more and more people want to participate, the logistics can be somewhat daunting. Buying enough copies for everyone to borrow and read at the same time can be a budgetary strain, and while those copies will circulate while the club is in session, demand will cool down when a new selection comes along.

With that in mind, we are pleased to announce the hoopla Book Club! Each quarter, our eBook and audiobook experts will be selecting a great new title to share with literature-loving library patrons. Our simultaneous use model makes hoopla the perfect tool to drive engagement, as book clubs of any size can share the latest title without patrons needing to wait for copies to come available. Each selection will be supplemented with a wealth of related materials such as a discussion guide, an author Q&A, and a list of associated titles that patrons who liked the book will want to explore. These resources can be found at our handy Book Club Hub, available at theclub.hoopladigital.com.

We’re getting started with a bang: the first Spotlight Selection for the hoopla Book Club is The Leavers by Lisa Ko. Available on hoopla in both audiobook and eBook formats, this wonderful novel won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award, among other accolades. The story of a young Chinese boy struggling to adapt to the white culture he’s adopted into when his mother seemingly abandons him, the book is “achingly beautiful” (Christian Science Monitor) and “required reading” (award-winning author Ann Patchett). This all adds up to what our own Tara Carberry calls “the perfect Spotlight Selection.” For more on why we chose this book, check out “Why We Love The Leavers,” a resource available on our Book Club Hub. And as part of our Book Club collection, patrons will also find eight other titles from a variety of genres, for those looking for more selections or whose reading tastes lie in a different direction.

If your library hasn’t yet received our summer reading materials, they should be arriving soon. As part of this mailing, you’ll find a poster you can display in your library to let patrons know about the hoopla Book Club and our first Spotlight Selection, The Leavers, along with bookmarks you can distribute. We hope your patrons love this new Book Club, and we encourage them (and you!) to interact with us as they read, both on Facebook and on Twitter with the hashtags #discoverreadshare and #hooplabookclub.