Dave Eggers appearance highlights library’s ambitious ‘Our Community Reads’ program

The big news in the Santa Cruz Public Libraries system this month isn’t necessarily that the new Aptos branch library is on the verge of opening (Feb. 4 target date). The big news is something else altogether.

“This is the big fish that we managed to catch.” 

So said Denise Ward of the volunteer Friends of Aptos Library. That “big fish” she’s referring to is celebrated author Dave Eggers, who is at the center of this winter’s “Our Community Reads” program. “OCR” is a program in which the county’s book-loving community reads one book together and a number of events enhance that otherwise solitary experience. 

This year’s book is “The Monk of Mokha,” a nonfiction title by Eggers originally published in 2018. As part of the program, Eggers himself will visit the area to talk about his experience writing the book and about the book’s compelling protagonist, Mokhtar Alkhanshali. 

The program officially kicks off Wednesday, Jan. 24, with a book discussion event on “The Monk of Mokha” hosted by Bookshop Santa Cruz owner Casey Coonerty Protti at The Loft coffee shop on the campus of Cabrillo College. That’s followed on Tuesday, Jan. 30, by “An Evening with Dave Eggers” at The 418 Project in Santa Cruz. 

“The Monk of Mokha” is the unlikely story of Alkhanshali, an American-born man with family roots in the war-torn nation of Yemen, on the Arabian Peninsula. He grew up in the Tenderloin in downtown San Francisco, working as a hotel doorman, before deciding to switch directions in his life, travel back to Yemen and revive that country’s slumping coffee industry by supporting coffee farmers and establishing an import market in the Bay Area.

“It’s such a great read,” said Ward of “Monk.” “Dave is such a great writer, and in this particular story, it becomes a real page-turner. [Alkhanshali] starts to be more and more convinced that he’s on the right track, and that he can work with coffee farmers in Yemen and get them to get the coffee growing again.”

The book tells the story of how Yemeni farmers had converted their coffee plantations to grow a more profitable product, a shrub used as a stimulant known as khat, and how Alkhanshali faced real peril working with farmers to get them growing coffee again.

“This book was published in 2018,” said Ward, “and I think that was right as the war was breaking out. So he almost got kidnapped, and thought he was gonna get killed over there. It was really, really harrowing for him. But, anyway, the stories and education you’ll get about coffee … you learn everything you could possibly know about coffee.”

The Eggers event is to be followed by several other “OCR” events. On Friday, Feb. 2, at the Scotts Valley Library, UC Davis professor Flagg Miller will talk about his research into the role coffee has played in Yemeni culture. On Tuesday, Feb. 6, at the Capitola Library, Cabrillo English professor Geneffa Jahan moderates a Zoom discussion with Yemeni American activist Jehan Hakim. The next day, at the Felton Library, artist Lise Bixler leads a workshop in creating Valentine’s Day cards with coffee paint.

Even those events mark only the beginning of the monthlong celebration of coffee culture and examination of Yemeni culture inspired by “The Monk of Mokha.” There are live music events, other workshops, a pair of documentary film screenings, a tour of Verve Coffee in Santa Cruz and, the culminating event, a trivia night hosted by Second District County Supervisor Zach Friend on Tuesday, Feb. 27. 

It’s an ambitious program, expanding on the 2023 “Our Community Reads” on Marisa Silver’s novel “Mary Coin.” The process for putting together the “OCR” program begins, said Ward, sometime in early June, when a committee of volunteers begins work on developing a shortlist of books to be considered. In September, the shortlist is presented for a community “vote party” in which the featured book is chosen. In 2023, 60 participating community members voted to choose the Eggers book over a shortlist that included “The Island of Missing Trees” by Elif Shafak, “Running With Sherman” by Christopher McDougall and “Klara and the Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro.

What kind of book tends to be chosen for “Our Community Reads”? Ward said, “We want something with wide appeal, with themes that resonate with our audience. We don’t want anything too risque, since we have a lot of high school students involved. Nothing written by a politician, or anything like that. And we don’t want something that is really weighty, and long. It’s hard for people to read something that’s 500 or 600 pages in the time allotted.”

To get copies of the book distributed, the Friends of the Library orders through Bookshop and packages the books in kits available for checkout to book clubs. Copies are also donated to local high schools and local eldercare facilities. Bookshop Santa Cruz also carries extra copies of the book, said Ward. 

For a full list of events, places, times and more details, go here. All the events are free, though they require registration. The Eggers event is now full.

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