Every month there are new titles purchased for the Too Good to Miss collections at our libraries. If you're not familiar with TGTM (as we call it here in
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library-world), it's a special collection of popular books that are truly too good to miss. Some are new and popular titles, others are older titles that might not have had as much media attention as a bestseller or celebrity book club selection but are still great reads that deserve another look. New books are added to the collection monthly, and are available at all Madison Public Library locations on a walk-in, first-come-first-served basis.
For this month of June we have six new titles that were added.**
Nonfiction
Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World by Mona Eltahawy - This is not a medical textbook, nor is it a guide on how to remedy or fix anything. Rather, it is a collection of menopausal individuals - women, transmasculine and non-binary people - with their own entry point into that transition who can share unique insights and anecdotes about menopause.
The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love by Janet Hardy - For anyone who has ever dreamed of love, sex, and companionship beyond the limits of traditional monogamy, this groundbreaking guide navigates the infinite possibilities that open relationships can offer.
The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides - an epic account of the most momentous voyage of the Age of Exploration, which culminated in Captain James Cook's death in Hawaii, and left a complex and controversial legacy still debated to this day.
Fiction
Failure to Comply by Cavar - Set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future, this literary sci-fi novel presents a world where humans have been unshackled from disease and their basest desires thanks to the genetic engineering and societal supervision of RSCH--an inscrutable entity with unimaginable power (including the ability to literally shape reality). In RSCH's march toward perfecting the species, however, there are "deviants" (including LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities) who are fighting for a different vision of humanity.
James by Percival Everett (2025 Go Big Read title) - This is a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view.
In Universes by Emet North - Raffi works in an observational cosmology lab, searching for dark matter. Every chance they get, they escape to see Britt, a queer sculptor who fascinates them for reasons they can't understand. As Raffi's carefully constructed life begins to collapse, they dream of a universe where they mean as much to Britt as Britt does to them.
**Linked titles are to the regular copies, which may have hold lists. The TGTM browse collection books are separate from those.