Skip to main content

Too Good to Miss - May 2025

Posted by MADreads on May 5, 2025 - 7:24pm
Image
Too Good to Miss photo

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 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 May we have six new titles that were added.**

Nonfiction
Asylum: A Memoir & Manifesto by Edafe Okporo - On the eve of Edafe Okporo's twenty-sixth birthday, he was awoken to a violent mob outside his window in Abuja, Nigeria. The mob threatened his life after discovering the secret Edafe had been hiding for years--that he is a gay man. Left with no other choice, he purchased a one-way plane ticket to New York City and fled for his life. Though America had always been painted to him as a land of freedom and opportunity, it was anything but when he arrived just days before the tumultuous 2016 Presidential Election.
Dateable: Swiping Right, Hooking Up, and Settling Down While Chronically Ill and Disabled by Jessica Slice and Caroline Cupp -  In Dateable, disabled author and essayist Jessica Slice and disabled bioethicist and progressive faith leader Caroline Cupp team up to address the serious gap in the dating space. A dating guide made especially for disabled and chronically ill people, that calls in able bodied readers, Dateable is the first book on disabled dating and relationships.
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley - By uncovering disturbing patterns that are as prevalent today as ever, Stanley reveals that the stuff of politics--charged by rhetoric and myth--can quickly become policy and reality. Only by recognizing fascists politics, he argues, may we resist its most harmful effects and return to democratic ideals

Fiction
Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn - Coral is the first person to discover the body of her brother, Jay, in the wake of his suicide. There's no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother. Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire, becomes increasingly untethered from reality.
Time's Agent by Brenda Peynado - Following humanity's discovery of pocket worlds, teams of academics embarked on groundbreaking exploratory missions, eager to study this new technology and harness the potential of a seemingly limitless horizon. "What would you do, given another universe, a do-over?" Archeologist Raquel and her wife Marlena once dreamed the pocket worlds held the key to solving the universe's mysteries. But forty years later, pocket worlds are now controlled by corporations squeezing every penny out of all colonizable space and time, Raquel herself is in disgrace, and Marlena lives in her own pocket universe.
The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson - Orphaned at a young age, Rosalie Iron Wing has been at society's margins all her life. While Rosalie was in foster care as a teen, her one friend got pregnant and was sent away. Now in early middle age, she is widowed. Grief and the need to remember her roots drive her to the family cabin, which has stood abandoned. There, she remembers the Dakota ways her father taught her.

**Linked titles are to the regular copies, which may have hold lists. The TGTM browse collection books are separate from those.