Spare Parts, a nonfiction book by journalist and filmmaker Joshua Davis, has been selected as the winning title for Our Community Reads 2026, launching a community wide reading and event series beginning Jan. 22 at Bookshop Santa Cruz.
The book tells the true story of four undocumented Latino high school students from Watsonville who built an underwater robot on a shoestring budget and went on to compete against college engineering teams in a NASA-sponsored robotics competition. The project and its success form the centerpiece of the annual Our Community Reads program, which encourages shared reading and discussion around a single title and its themes.
The 2026 season opens with a public book discussion Thursday, Jan. 22, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at The Loft Coffee Shop at Cabrillo College in Aptos. The discussion will be facilitated by Casey Coonerty Protti, owner of Bookshop Santa Cruz.
A related documentary, Underwater Dreams, which chronicles the students and their underwater robot, will be screened Tuesday, Jan. 27, at 6:30 p.m. at the Capitola Branch Library.
An author talk featuring Davis is scheduled for Tuesday, Feb. 24, at 6:30 p.m. at the Colligan Theater in Santa Cruz. Davis will discuss how he discovered the students from Carl Hayden School and how their story shaped his understanding of leadership, opportunity and perseverance, as well as his view of the American Dream.
Donations will be accepted at the door.
Additional Our Community Reads programs tied to the themes of Spare Parts will include discussions, workshops and presentations throughout January and February.
Joshua Davis
Davis is an award-winning journalist, author and filmmaker whose work spans reporting, documentaries and books. His films and shows have won multiple honors, including a Festival Favorite award at the Sundance Film Festival, a Special Jury Prize at Sundance, and the Silver Goddess Award from the Association of Mexican Film Journalists.
As a reporter, Davis has worked inside prisons on three continents and covered the 2003 war in Iraq, the Libyan revolution and the emergence of super-cocaine behind FARC lines in Colombia. His writing has been nominated for a National Magazine Award in feature writing, and he was a finalist for the honor in 2014.
His work has been anthologized in the 2012 edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing and in the 2006, 2007 and 2009 editions of The Best Technology Writing. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Spare Parts in 2014, naming it Davis’ third book. The book was later selected as one of the best new books by Amazon and the BBC.
A film adaptation of Spare Parts was released by Lionsgate in 2015 and starred George Lopez, Carlos Pena, Marisa Tomei and Jamie Lee Curtis.
Davis’ earlier projects include the 2002 documentary The Beast Within, which followed his attempt to become the lightweight arm-wrestling champion of the world and won Best Documentary at the 2003 Telluride Mountain Film Festival. Random House published his first book, The Underdog, in 2005, followed by Entrenched, an anthology of his work.