Pasadena’s community-wide reading celebration is designed to broaden and deepen an appreciation of reading and literature.  The project is also intended to engage the community in dialogue and seeks to bring the Pasadena community together by promoting tolerance and understanding about differing points of view.

One City, One Story Book Selection
	Easter Island by Jennifer Vanderbes Published 2003 by Dial Press Hardcover, English. ISBN: 9780385336734 Find this book in our catalog. Video Archive An Evening with the Author, Jennifer Vanderbes (56 minutes) From Publisher's Weekly 05/19/2003 Restrained passion and conflicted loyalties drive this sweeping debut novel, in which two women of different eras experience the mysteries of Easter Island. In 1912, Elsa Pendleton's father dies and leaves her to care for her 19-year-old sister, Alice, who is beautiful but not quite right in the head. To secure their position, 22-year-old Elsa marries Edward Beazley and they travel to Easter Island. In a parallel narrative, Greer Farraday, a young American botanist recovering from a disastrous marriage to an older professor, arrives on the island in 1973 to uncover the mystery of the island's lack of native trees. As Elsa and Greer's stories play out in alternating sections, a third element is intertwined: the tale of Graf Von Spee, the German admiral who led his ill-fated fleet across the South Pacific at the outbreak of World War I.
2008 Nominees
	Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer Published 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company Hardcover, English. ISBN: 9780618329700 Find this book in our catalog. Oskar Schell is an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler, pacifist. He is nine years old. And he is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center.
	The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea Published 2005 by Little Brown and Company Hardcover, English. ISBN: 9780316745468 Find this book in our catalog. This historical novel is based on Urrea's real great-aunt Teresita, who had healing powers and was acclaimed as a saint. Urrea has researched historical accounts and family records for years to get an accurate story.
	Moloka'i by Alan Brennert Published 2003 by St. Martin's Press Hardcover, English. ISBN: 9780312304348 Find this book in our catalog. From Publisher's Weekly 09/01/2003 Compellingly original in its conceit, Brennert's sweeping debut novel tracks the grim struggle of a Hawaiian woman who contracts leprosy as a child in Honolulu during the 1890s and is deported to the island of Moloka'i, where she grows to adulthood at the quarantined settlement of Kalaupapa.
	The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia Published 2005 by McSweeney's Books Hardcover, English. ISBN: 9781932416213 Find this book in our catalog. A mesmerizing debut novel about the anguish of lost love...Federico de la Fe is a devoted husband and father, but when his lime-loving wife, Merced, abandons him, he and his daughter, Little Merced, must start new life together. They leave their home in Mexico and head for California.
	What Is the What by Dave Eggers Published 2006 by McSweeney's Books Hardcover, English. ISBN: 9781932416640 Find this book in our catalog. An epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children, was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot.