Book: There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib 
This book is the 2025 Reading across Rhode Island (RARI) selection.

COPIES OF THE BOOK WILL BE ABLE FOR CHECKOUT AT THE CIRCULATION DESK AT THE END OF MARCH.

Monthly book club meetings are held at 6:30 pm on the last Wednesday of the month unless otherwise noted.  Meet us in the Upstairs Conference Room or on Zoom (register for the link). New members are always welcome!

Led by Susan Tacent and funded through the generosity of the Friends of the Rogers Free Library.

Synopsis: Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s, Hanif Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron James were forged and countless others weren’t. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tension between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with intimate, personal storytelling. “Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father’s jump shot,” Abdurraqib writes. “The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time.”

There’s Always This Year is a triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. No matter the subject of his keen focus—whether it’s basketball, or music, or performance—Hanif Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.