2020 Reading Challenge: Read a Book by a Nebraska Author

In 2020, OPL invites patrons to take part in the reading challenge! For each challenge, OPL offers suggestions for titles to read or listen to. As you’re working through the challenge, feel free to tag @omahalibrary on Twitter, opens a new window, Instagram, opens a new window or Facebook, opens a new window to let us know which read you picked up this month!

This past year saw a wonderful array of books authored by Nebraska natives and local writers. Checking out these latest titles is a great way to approach this challenge, if you don’t already have a favorite Nebraska author.

“After the Flood, opens a new window,” is the first novel by Kassandra Montag and started getting buzz when it made waves at the 2018 London Book Fair, before getting a screen rights deal and being picked as an American Library Association Libraries Transform Book Pick. Set more than 100 years in the future, “After the Flood,” tells the story of a mother desperately searching for her daughter across a world devastated by rising ocean waters and the crumbling of civilization.

For more fiction ideas, you might try the new thriller “The Line Between, opens a new window” by Tosca Lee, the sequel, “A Single Light, opens a new window” which is also already out. In this thriller, doomsday cult survivor Wynter Roth is plunged into a world gone mad when an ancient disease emerges from the Alaskan permafrost.

Another rich area to mine for new titles would be the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s English faculty which includes, Kwame Dawes’ novel, “Bivouac, opens a new window,” the essay collection, “My Time Among the Whites: Notes From an Unfinished Education, opens a new window,” by Jennine Capó Crucet or even the new children’s book, “Mr. Posey's New Glasses, opens a new window” by former U.S. poet laureate Ted Kooser.

Nonfiction and memoirs are another strong area for local titles. Check out “24th & Glory, opens a new window” by Dirk Chatelain, Omaha native Andrew Rannells’s “Too Much Is Not Enough: A Memoir of Fumbling Toward Adulthood, opens a new window,” Garry Clark’s “Unlikely Viking: From the D.C. Projects to Rural Nebraska, opens a new window” or Mary Pipher’s “Women Rowing North: Navigating Life's Currents and Flourishing as We Age, opens a new window.”

You can see all these titles and a few more in this list, opens a new window.

Starting April 1, 2020, once you complete the 2020 Reading Challenge, enter your reading log online or turn in your completed tracking sheet at your nearest OPL branch and pick up your button prize for completion. All submissions will be entered into a drawing for some fun literary-themed merchandise! All completed tracking sheets or online challenge form entries must be received by December 31, 2020, to be entered into the prize drawing.