Everybody Reads 2023: Ruth Ozeki

Celebrate the power of books to create a stronger community by attending the 2023 Everybody Reads author event with Ruth Ozeki!

In partnership with Multnomah County Library and The Library Foundation, Literary Arts is proud to present a lecture by bestselling author Ruth Ozeki as the culminating event of Everybody Reads 2023. Everybody Reads is an annual community-wide project that promotes shared reading and discussion around a single book.  This year’s programming will center on Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, a finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Copies of the book are available for free at all Multnomah County Library branches thanks to the generosity of The Library Foundation. 

COMMUNITY TICKETS:
Free and reduced-priced tickets are available to this event. Learn more here.

FREE YOUTH TICKETS:
Through our ‘Students to the Schnitz’ initiative, ALL youth 17 & under (or with a valid high school ID) can claim FREE tickets to this event. Order online by entering promo code YOUTH before making a seating selection, or call Portland’5 Box Office at 503-248-4335 to both purchase tickets and claim free youth tickets over the phone.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.

At this time this event does not require proof of vaccination. Wearing a face mask is optional but strongly recommended.

Vaccination and masking policies will vary for all our events this season and will depend on factors such as public health mandates, venue requirements, and artist preferences, which are subject to change.

Click here for more information about our COVID-19 policies.

To support this event as a sponsor, please contact Lydah DeBin at lydah@literary-arts.org or call 503-989-7110.