Announcing our First Book Club Pick 🤩

After a very, very close vote, our first official book club pick is…

The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar

Synopsis:

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction
Winner of the ALA Stonewall Book Award--Barbara Gittings Literature Award
Named Best Book of the Year by Bustle
Named Most Anticipated Book of the Year by The Millions, Electric Literature, and HuffPost

​​From the award-winning author of The Map of Salt and Stars, a novel about three generations of Syrian Americans haunted by a mysterious species of bird and the truths they carry close to their hearts--a "vivid exploration of loss, art, queer and trans communities, and the persistence of history. Often tender, always engrossing, The Thirty Names of Night is a feat" (R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries).

Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. As his grandmother's sole caretaker, he spends his days cooped up in their apartment, avoiding his neighborhood masjid, his estranged sister, and even his best friend (who also happens to be his longtime crush). The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria, but he's been struggling ever since his mother's ghost began visiting him each evening.

One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to painting birds. She mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that both his mother and Laila Z encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. In fact, Laila Z's past is intimately tied to his mother's in ways he never could have expected. Even more surprising, Laila Z's story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his own community that he never knew. Realizing that he isn't and has never been alone, he has the courage to claim a new name: Nadir, an Arabic name meaning rare.

As unprecedented numbers of birds are mysteriously drawn to the New York City skies, Nadir enlists the help of his family and friends to unravel what happened to Laila Z and the rare bird his mother died trying to save. Following his mother's ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along.

Featuring Zeyn Joukhadar's signature "folkloric, lyrical, and emotionally intense...gorgeous and alive" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) storytelling, The Thirty Names of Night is a "stunning...vivid, visceral, and urgent" (Booklist, starred review) exploration of loss, memory, migration, and identity.

Recommended ways to acquire the book:

There are countless ways to acquire The Thirty Names of Night if you don’t already own it, but here are our recommendations:

• Order directly from us! We're offering a 10% discount for folks who want to purchase directly through us. We'll need to order from the publisher, so orders might take a week or two to get to you, but ordering through us is the best way to support our store while getting a great book for book club! You can order a book through our RSVP form below.

• Order through Bookshop.org

• Purchase the audiobook from Libro.fm

• Your local library! Multnomah County Library has a copy in stock right now as well as the Clackamas County Library. You can be a member of both library systems if you live in either county.  

• Borrow from a bud

Join Us for Book Club:

Virtual Meeting:

Wednesday, March 11th at 6pm (Link will be shared closer to event date)

In Person Meeting:

Sunday, March 15th at 4:30pm at Hungry Heart Bakery
414 SE 80th Ave Portland, OR 97215
😷 Masks required

Masks Now Required for In Person Events

As some of you know, I (Zo) struggle with a few chronic illnesses and I know several of you do as well. We are making a move to host in person events at Hungry Heart outside of their normal business hours to 1. make it easier for me to facilitate events and 2. so we can establish a masking policy to make our events more accessible.

Masking helps keep one another healthy and safe from COVID and many of the other airborne illnesses our immune systems fight against all the time. We kindly ask that you mask at our in person events to make it more inclusive of our immunocompromised friends (like me) and to help prevent spread of illness. If you are feeling ill, please stay home and rest until you feel better.

We will try to provide some masks at our events for those who forget, but this can get expensive. If you are able or willing to help donate masks or funds to help us provide masks to attendees, please reach out and let us know.

Other accessibility notes for Hungry Heart: 

• There is a big step up to the front door that can be challenging for folks who use mobility aids, especially wheelchairs. If this step is a hindrance for you, please go around the north side of the building and enter through the back door. The back entrance does not have any steps and is ADA accessible.

• Hungry Heart has a mix of bench seating, metal chairs with wooden seats, and metal stools with wooden seats. My hope is the array of seating options will mean folks will be able to find a seat that is comfortable for their specific body.

Have questions, concerns, or feedback about accessibility at our events? Please reach out. We strive to be as accessible and inclusive as possible.

Looking to read more diversely in 2026? Join our reading challenge on Storygraph!

Storygraph is a great reading tracking app. We love the graphs, monthly and yearly wrap-ups, and how they handle reviews. The feature we probably love the most is the ability to participate in Reading Challenges! For 2026, we’ve created our own reading challenge to help folks read a little more diversely for 2026. Whether you like to listen to your books, read digitally or physically, our hope is that you’ll try some new genres this year and expand your worldview by reading authors with identities and life experiences different from your own. We’ve created 12 prompts and each prompt has a handful of suggested books to get you started. We can’t wait to see what you read in 2026.

Upcoming Events:

• Thursday, January 29th: Cozy, Quiet Book Club, 5:30pm | Hungry Heart | 414 SE 80th Ave

  • We’ll mingle a little, read quietly for about an hour, then mingle a little more! Please note the bakery will be closed, so feel free to bring your own snacks or drinks.

  • Masks required for in person events!

• Thursday, February 26: Cozy, Quiet Book Club, 5:30pm | Hungry Heart | 414 SE 80th Ave

• Wednesday, March 11: Virtual Book Club, 6pm | The Internet (TBD)

• Sunday, March 15: In Person Book Club, 4:30pm | Hungry Heart | 414 SE 80th Ave

• Keep your eyes on our event page for more fun!

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