Filipino-American novel for Real Lit[erature] Book Club, Spring Quarter 2020

Real Lit[erature] 2020 is reading Patron Saints of Nothing!

Decorative image of the book, Patron saints of Nothing. Young man of color surrounded with a saint halo.Get a free book! Discuss with peers, faculty, and staff!

Real Lit[erature] — UW Tacoma’s fiction based book club co-created by the UW Tacoma Library and the Center for Equity and Inclusion — will have its next sessions Spring Quarter 2020, and you won’t want to miss out on participating! We are reading Randy Ribay’s Patron Saints of Nothing, an exploration of identity, the drug war in the Philippines, and what family means to us.  As always, all are welcome: staff, students, faculty.  Students will receive a free copy of the book on a first come, first serve basis. And stay tuned about skyping with the author, as we have in the past!

Ribay’s book is A National Book Award Finalist, An NPR Best Book of the Year, A New York Public Library Top 10 Best Book of the Year, and A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, to name just a bit of the attention this book has garnered.

Here’s the summary from the publisher:

“A powerful coming-of-age story about grief, guilt, and the risks a Filipino-American teenager takes to uncover the truth about his cousin’s murder. Jay Reguero plans to spend the last semester of his senior year playing video games before heading to the University of Michigan in the fall. But when he discovers that his Filipino cousin Jun was murdered as part of President Duterte’s war on drugs, and no one in the family wants to talk about what happened, Jay travels to the Philippines to find out the real story. Hoping to uncover more about Jun and the events that led to his death, Jay is forced to reckon with the many sides of his cousin before he can face the whole horrible truth — and the part he played in it. As gripping as it is lyrical, Patron Saints of Nothing is a page-turning portrayal of the struggle to reconcile faith, family, and immigrant identity.”

To sign up for the Real Lit Book Club, please click here!

To request disability accommodation, including American Sign Language interpretation, contact the Disability Resources for Students office at 253-692-4508, drsuwt@uw.edu or submit a request here.

Want to help build a collection of books focused around Equity, Diversity and Inclusion?

Text reads: Recommended Reads for Equity, with images of book titlesThere is a cool tri-campus book collection project that YOU can access suggest titles for!

Recommended Reads for Equity engages the UW community in critical conversations, reading, critical thinking and community building; all of which are essential to lifelong learning and engaged citizenship.

Guided by the UW community, Racial Reads for Equity collects recommendations for books about equity, diversity, and inclusion and create opportunities to share recommendations and hold conversations and discussions as a whole campus community. If you have read a compelling book focusing on diversity, equity, or inclusion, suggest it to the libraries for purchase! To see the recommendations of others’ and browse books already in the collection by genre, check out this guide!