In March 2018, we sent a note to our Opportunity community sharing something new—a chance to learn about the world, dive into great literature, and connect with Opportunity clients in a unique way. We launched the Opportunity Book Club, and for more than five years, we’ve delivered monthly book recommendations to your inbox, inviting you to read with your fellow Book Club members around the country, and around the world.
Whether you’ve been with us since the beginning or jumped in somewhere along the way, it’s been an enormous joy getting to read alongside you. But now it’s time for us to finish this chapter and close the Opportunity Book Club. We have so much gratitude for each of you who have read with us over the years!
We’ve been around the world together. We traveled to Rwanda through We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch, The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya, and Left to Tell by Immaculée Ilibagiza; to India in Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara and Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo; and to Colombia in The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras and Infinite Country by Patricia Engel … and that was just the beginning.
We’ve read modern bestsellers like The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue, and Hum If You Don’t Know the Words by Bianca Marais—and classics like Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.
We’ve read with our kids (The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba, A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park, Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate), featured our friends (Bigger Than Me by Ward Brehm, Strong Connections: Stories of Resilience from the Far Reaches of the Mobile Phone Revolution by Rosa Wang, Looking Up by Michele Sullivan), and chose a few of our own Opportunity Book Club favorites (Factfulness by Hans Rosling, UnPoverty by Mark Lutz, The Moment of Lift by Melinda Gates).
We hope these last five years have been as special for you as they have for us—and we hope this is only the beginning of your around-the-world reading.
From all of us here at the Opportunity Book Club, thank you for being part of this community. A special thanks to one of our chief reader and originator of the Club, Allison Hastings, for leading the charge along the way. More than anything, thank you for supporting Opportunity International. We have exciting things ahead and can’t wait to share them with you!
