Big Library Read

April 25, 2023

Readers can join a global digital book club during Big Library Read this May.

From May 3-17, book lovers around the world can unite to read and discuss the National Book Award Finalist, Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho. The eBook and digital audiobook are free through our catalogue or on the Libby App with a Vancouver Island Regional Library card and there are no waits!

Readers can then discuss the book online.

Book Summary:

Grace M. Cho grew up in a small, rural American town as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. When Grace was fifteen, her Korean mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue for the rest of her life. Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a daughter’s search through intimate and global history to understand herself and the cultural roots of her mother’s condition. — Provided by publisher.

Learn about the author:

Grace M. Cho is the author of Tastes Like War, a 2021 National Book Awards finalist, and Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War, which received a 2010 book award from the American Sociological Association. Her writings have appeared in journals such as the New InquiryPoem Memoir StoryContextsGastronomicaFeminist StudiesWSQ, and Qualitative Inquiry. She is associate professor of sociology and anthropology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY.