Summer Reading and Activities

Upcoming Events

This event is in the "Everyone" group

Somis Elementary School

1:00pm–3:00pm
Everyone
Offsite Event
Library Branch: Mobile Library
Room: MOB- Main Vehicle
Age Group: Everyone
Event Details:

The Mobile Library will be parked in front of Somis Elementary serving both the school and the community. 

This event is in the "Children" group
This event is in the "Elementary" group
This event is in the "Middle School" group
This event is in the "High School" group
This event is in the "Family" group

Family Game Day @ Oak View Library

1:30pm–3:30pm
Children, Elementary, Middle School, High School, Family
Library Branch: Oak View Library
Age Group: Children, Elementary, Middle School, High School, Family
Program Type: Games & Play
Event Details:

Join us for an epic day of fun with Gamez on Wheelz—a mobile gaming experience for kids and teens! 

This event is in the "Children" group
This event is in the "Teens" group
This event is in the "Family" group

Soliz- Kids Farmers Market

2:00pm–3:00pm
Children, Teens, Family
Library Branch: Albert H. Soliz Library
Age Group: Children, Teens, Family
Event Details:

Food Share will host a short nutrition education lesson, a hands-on recipe, and will provide a box of the produce for each family to take home.

 

This event is in the "Children" group
This event is in the "Teens" group
This event is in the "Family" group

LEGO Play

2:00pm–4:00pm
Children, Teens, Family
Library Branch: Avenue Library
Age Group: Children, Teens, Family
Program Type: Games & Play
Event Details:

Get creative with LEGO play every Wednesday from 2pm to 4pm at the Avenue Library.  

As LEGO pieces may be a choking hazard, parental guidance is required for small children.

This event is in the "Children" group
This event is in the "Elementary" group
This event is in the "Family" group

Level Up at the Innovation Lab!

2:00pm–4:00pm
Children, Elementary, Family
Library Branch: Ray D. Prueter Library
Room: PRU-Innovation Lab
Age Group: Children, Elementary, Family
Program Type: Arts & Crafts, Games & Play, Science & Technology
Event Details:

Level up your curiosity this summer in the Rosenbluth Family Innovation Lab! Build your own foosball game, create a design with a 3D pen or win a prize in our Minute to Win it Games! It's all happening this summer at your library!

This event is in the "Children" group

Paws for Reading at Ojai Library

2:30pm–3:30pm
Children
Library Branch: Ojai Library
Age Group: Children
Program Type: Literacy
Event Details:

Join us at the Ojai Library for an adorable and educational event - Paws for Reading! Every Wednesday from 2:30 - 3:30PM, kids can cozy up with a furry friend, Radiant the dog, and practice their reading skills.

This event is in the "Children" group

STEAM Lab at Ojai Library

3:00pm–5:00pm
Children
Library Branch: Ojai Library
Age Group: Children
Program Type: Science & Technology
Event Details:

Calling all young scientists, engineers, and innovators! Dive into the world of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) at our weekly STEAM Lab.

This event is in the "Children" group
This event is in the "Preschool" group
This event is in the "Elementary" group
This event is in the "Family" group

Crafty Little Fox Club

3:30pm–5:00pm
Children, Preschool, Elementary, Family
Library Branch: E.P. Foster Library
Age Group: Children, Preschool, Elementary, Family
Program Type: Arts & Crafts
Event Details:

Join us every Wednesday afternoon for self-guided arts, crafts and coloring.

A special, structured craft will be provided every 4th Wednesday of the month.

This event is in the "Children" group
This event is in the "Family" group

Game Day at Meiners Oaks Library

3:30pm–5:00pm
Children, Family
Library Branch: Meiners Oaks Library
Room: MNO-Meeting Room A/B
Age Group: Children, Family
Program Type: Games & Play
Event Details:

Join us for games at the Meiners Oaks Library!

June 18 Mario Kart

June 25 classic board games

July 2 Mario Kart

July 9 Lego party 

July 16 classic board games

July 23 lawn games

Fiction Spotlight: Level Up!

A large wave behind the title

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Sam and Sadie—two college friends, often in love, but never lovers—become creative partners in a dazzling and intricately imagined world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality. It is a love story, but not one you have read before. 

"Delightful and absorbing." —The New York Times • "Utterly brilliant." —John Green

One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Century • A Los Angeles Times Best Fiction Book of the Last 30 Years • One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, TIME, GoodReads, Oprah Daily

From the best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry: On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. 

These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love.

A yellow and grey chess board seen from above with chess pieces shadowed by the novel's characters

Intermezzo

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | A National Indie Bestseller
Short-listed for the An Post Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year
Finalist for the Barnes and Noble Book of the Year

Named a Best Book of the Year and a Critics’ Pick by The New York Times 
Named an Essential Read by The New Yorker 
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, Financial Times, Vogue, The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, Vox, The Times (UK), Apple Books, and more
A USA Today, People, and Associated Press Top 10 Book of the Year

One of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2024 
One of Chicago Public Library’s Favorite Books of the Year 

An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. 

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. 

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. 

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

Title in bright yellow font which is breaking apart against a purple and green background

We are Watching Eliza Bright

Named a Best Book of 2021 by NPR * Harper's Bazaar * CrimeReads * Electric Literature * Autostraddle * The Globe and Mail



In this thrilling story of survival and anger, a woman has her whole life turned upside down after speaking out against workplace hostility-and inadvertently becomes the leader of a cultural movement.



Eliza Bright is living the dream as an elite video game coder at Fancy Dog Games, the first woman to ascend that high in the ranks--and some people want to make sure she's the last. To her friends, Eliza Bright is a brilliant, self-taught coder bravely calling out the misogyny that pervades her workplace and industry. To the men who see her very presence as a threat, Eliza Bright is a woman who needs to be destroyed to protect the game they love. 



When Eliza's report of workplace harassment is quickly dismissed, she's forced to take her frustrations to a journalist who blasts her story across the internet. She's fired and doxxed, and becomes a rallying figure for women everywhere. But she's also enraged the beast comprised of online male gamers--their unreliable chorus narrates our story. Soon, Eliza is in the cross-hairs of the gaming community, threatened and stalked as they monitor her every move online and across New York City. 



As the violent power of the angry male collective descends upon everyone in Eliza's life, it becomes increasingly difficult to know who to trust, even when she's eventually taken in and protected by an under-the-radar Collective known as the Sixsterhood. The violence moves from cyberspace to the real world, thanks to a vicious male super-fan known only as The Inspectre, determined to exact his revenge on behalf of men everywhere. We watch alongside the Sixsterhood and subreddit keyboard warriors as this dramatic cat-and-mouse game plays out to its violent and inevitable conclusion in this thrilling story of resilience and survival.

Two people on a beach with an umbrella and palm trees against a yellow background

In a Not So Perfect World

"Tubati Alexander is a writer to watch!" --Emily Giffin

One of Good Morning America's 15 books to read heading into spring and a SheReads and Zibby Mag Most Anticipated Book of the Year

The author of Love Buzz follows her acclaimed first novel with a delightful Caribbean-set romp about an ambitious designer of apocalyptic video games with a strategy for (almost) everything who discovers what happens when her best-laid plans go off course . . .

Sloane Cooper is up for her dream job as a designer for a top video game company. During the interview, though, she somehow promises the all-male panel that she'll remain single and fully dedicated to the work. It's actually fine--after her last boyfriend cheated on her, she vowed to focus on her career anyway.

Enter Charlie, aka Hot Neighbor Guy, a near-stranger who shocks her with the offer of an all-inclusive trip to a Turks and Caicos resort. The catch? Charlie originally planned the trip with his ex, and asks Sloane to pose as his new girlfriend to make his old flame come running back. Against her better judgment, Sloane says yes; she can use the time away to develop a game design that will dazzle the Catapult team and get her a job offer.

Despite sparks flying in paradise, the trip can't lead to more. As their connection deepens, Sloane is reminded that she can't fall for Charlie and get knocked off her professional path. Besides, he's trying to win back his true love.

Can Sloane figure out a way to move past heartbreak, land the job of her dreams, and avoid catching feelings? The zombie apocalypse would be easier to solve--at least she's prepared for that.

Image for "Board to Death"

Board to Death

The first in an ulta-charming new “quozy” mystery series starring Ben Rosencrantz, a queer 30-something English professor (and closet scifi fan) who’s returned to his hometown of Salt Lake City to run his family’s board game shop in the trendy Sugar House neighborhood – a community hotspot for players of all ages…and for killer collectors!

Back in his hometown of Sugar House running his family’s board game shop and café, Ben Rosencrantz just can’t seem to get his life to pass go, much less collect $200. Once he was a happily married English professor in Seattle. Now he’s a divorced caregiver, looking after his ill father and a Chihuahua named Beans while still figuring out the rules of retail management. At least the town has become more LGBTQ+ friendly than when Ben was a teenager—and that flower shop owner, Ezra McCaslin, enjoys flirting with him.

But despite his usual clientele of gamers, Ben is barely earning enough to keep the store running and stay on top of his father’s medical bills. Then a local toy and game collector named Clive offers him a winning strategy—to purchase a turn-of-the-twentieth-century edition of The Landlord’s Game, the realty and taxation game that inspired Monopoly, at a tenth of the rare edition’s true value. Suspicious of Clive’s shady, low-priced deal, Ben turns the offer down.

Then Clive turns up dead at the front door of Ben’s and a backpack full of $100 bills appears on his doorstep. Now Ben is the #1 suspect in Clive’s death, and unless he and Ezra can prove his innocence and find the real killer, he’ll go to jail for murder—and no amount of double dice rolls will set him free . . .