| | Book | Description | Author |
| 2003 |  A Lesson Before Dying Vintage Books USA $12.95 | A Lesson Before Dying Set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s, A Lesson Before Dying is an "enormously moving" ("Los Angeles Times") novel of one man condemned to die for a crime he did not commit and a young man who visits him in his cell. In the end, the two men forge a bond as they both come to understand the simple heroism of resisting--and defying--the expected. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. | Ernest J. Gaines |
| 2004 |  Fahrenheit 451 Del Ray Books $6.99 | Fahrenheit 451 Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which book paper burns. Fahrenheit 451 is a novel set in the (perhaps near) future when "firemen" burn books forbidden by a totalitarian "brave new world" regime. The hero, according to Mr. Bradbury, is "a book burner who suddenly discovers that books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out silently when put to the torch." Today, when libraries and schools in this country and all over the world are still "burning" certain books, Fahrenheit 451 remains a brilliantly readable and suspenseful work of even greater impact and timeliness. | Ray Bradbury |
| 2005 |  The House on Mango Street Vintage Books USA $10.95 | The House on Mango Street In a series of vignettes stunning for their eloquence, this is the story of Esperanza Cordero, a young girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago with all its hard realities of life. She captures her thoughts and emotions in poems and stories in order to rise above the hopelessness and create a space for herself. | Sandra Cisneros |
| 2006 | 
The Kite Runner Riverhead Books $15.00 | The Kite Runner An epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, that takes us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the atrocities of the present.
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption, and it is also about the power of fathers over sons-their love, their sacrifices, their lies. | Khaled Hosseini |
| 2007 | 
Midnight at the Dragon Cafe Counterpoint, LLC $14.95 | Midnight at the Dragon Cafe Judy Fong Bates's fresh and engaging first novel is the story of Su-Jen Chou, a Chinese girl growing up the only daughter of an unhappy and isolated immigrant family in a small Ontario town in the 1950s. Through Su-Jen's eyes we see the hard life behind the scenes at the Dragon Cafe, the local diner her family runs. Her half-brother Lee-Kung smolders under the responsibilities he must carry as the dutiful Chinese son. Her mother, beautiful but bitter, lays her hopes and dreams on Su-Jen's shoulders, until she turns to find solace in the most forbidden of places, while Su-Jen's elderly father strives to hek fuh, swallow bitterness, and save face at all costs. | Judy Fong Bates |
| 2008 | 
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier Sarah Crichton Books $12.00 | A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier This absorbing account by a young man who, as a boy of 12, gets swept up in Sierra Leone's civil war, goes beyond even the best journalistic efforts in revealing the life and mind of a child abducted into the horrors of warfare. | Ishmael Beah |
| 2009 | 
Stubborn Twig Oregon State University Press $18.95 | Stubborn Twig Stubborn Twig is the true story of three generations of a Japanese American family living in the Pacific Northwest. Their story was almost a story of the American dream. . . This is also the Oregon Reads book for 2009. | Lauren Kessler |
| 2010 | 
The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World Riverhead Books $15.00 | The Ghost Map Bestselling author Johnson illuminates the intertwined histories of the spread of cholera in 19th-century London, the rise of cities, and the nature of scientific inquiry, offering both a riveting history and a powerful explanation of how it has shaped the world of today. | Steven Johnson |
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