And The Winner Is … The Monk of Mokha

By Denise Ward

On Sept. 28, over 60 community members attended a voting party to pick next year’s Our Community Reads selection. The four choices were:

• The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak
• Running with Sherman, by Christopher McDougall
• Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Monk of Mokha, by Dave Eggers

And the winning selection is … The Monk of Mokha!

This is the true story of a young Yemeni-American man, born and raised in San Francisco who dreams of helping farmers in his ancestral country bring their coffee to the rest of the world.

Eggers leads us on an exciting modern-day adventure that takes us to coffee farms in Yemen and the outbreak of civil war. Our hero, aspiring coffee importer Mokhtar Alkhanshali, a
combination of Indiana Jones and Horatio Alger, leaves his dead-end job as a doorman with hopes of bringing Yemeni coffee to America. But first he has to contend with a corrupt government, Al-Qaeda, Red Sea pirates, tribal violence, kidnapping, and Saudi bombing attacks.

Now in its seventh year, Our Community Reads is a program of the Friends of the Aptos Library, in which the community selects a book and then comes together for a series of free events, panel discussions, films, workshops and trivia. These events are presented with the friends of the Capitola, Felton, La Selva Beach, and Scotts Valley libraries.

Grab a copy and get informed. Our calendar of events will be posted at santacruzpl.org and begin the end of January and run through early March.

See www.friendsofaptoslibrary.org

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Top Photo: Denise Ward holds the book chosen for Our Community Reads, which starts in 2024.