We know how difficult it is to choose a book for your next book group meeting, and to find enough copies for all the members of your group. We've made it easier for you by collecting donated and withdrawn copies of discussible books and putting all the copies in a canvas bag. We've included discussion questions and information about each author in a folder for each collection.
There are at least 8 copies of the book in each kit. At this time we have over 320 kits for you to choose from.
Printable lists of titles are also available, without cover art, sorted by title and by author.
How can we get a kit?
Call us at 608-315-5151 (toll free 888-266-7805) and we will help you check out a kit. The kit will be checked out on the library card of the person picking them up. The person checking out the kit may choose a due date for the kit, up to 3 months from the day they pick it up. Due to high demand, please take only one or two kits at a time. Kits can be shipped to any library in Madison as well as any public library in the South Central Library System.
What if a book is lost?
If your group happens to lose a book, we ask that you replace it with another copy of the book, new or second hand, that is clean and readable.
Search our collection of kits
When Madeline Was Young
After his young wife suffers brain damage and is left with the mind of a 6-year old, Aaron Maciver quietly divorces her and marries her nurse, and the two raise her as their child along with their daughter and son in this chronicle of an unusual family.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames
Sedaris returns with comic essays employing keen observation, absurdity and hilarity to explore everyday life from smoking to family dysfunction and death.
Where They Bury You
In August 1863, during Kit Carson's roundup of the Navajo, Santa Fe's Provost Marshal, Major Joseph Cummings, is found dead in an arroyo near what is now the Hubbell Trading Post in Ganado, Arizona. The murder, as well as the roughly million of today's dollars in cash and belongings in his saddlebags, is historically factual. Carson's explanation that he was shot by a lone Indian, which, even today, can be found in the U.S. Army Archives, is implausible. Who did kill Carson's ''brave and lamented'' Major?
Where'd You Go Bernadette?
In this unconventional and funny novel, a teenage girl assembles a mixed collection of documents to try to solve the disappearance of her mother, a former award-winning architect who found herself increasingly at odds with her life in Seattle.
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, how these reactions maintain racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.
The Whole World Over
Tempted by a job offer that draws her far from her home in New York, pastry chef Greenie embarks on a year that ends with her separated from her only child, and a strained marriage that culminates in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Drawing on the rich cast of characters she created in Three Junes, Glass considers the connections between those we love, and how the slightest changes can have long-lasting repercussions.
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Chang tells the story of three generations of women in her family who survived the political upheaval of China during the 20th century, beginning with her grandmother, a concubine to a warlord in feudal China, her mother, who rose to a prominent position in the Communist Party, to the author, raised during the Cultural Revolution until she was sent to study in England in 1978, giving a history of China from a personal perspective.
The Witch Elm
Toby is a happy-go-lucky charmer until a night out with friends takes a turn that will change his life - he surprises two burglars who beat him and leave him for dead. Struggling to recover from his injuries, he takes refuge at his family's ancestral home to care for his dying uncle Hugo. Then a skull is found in the trunk of an elm tree in the garden - and as detectives close in, Toby is forced to face the possibility that his past may not be what he has always believed.
Witnessing Whiteness: The Need to Talk About Race and How to Do It
Witnessing Whiteness invites readers to consider what it means to be white, describes and critiques strategies used to avoid race issues, and identifies the detrimental effect of avoiding race on cross-race collaborations. The book also offers practical information on building knowledge, skills, capacities, and communities that support anti-racism practices, a hopeful look at our collective future, and a discussion of how to create a culture of witnesses who support allies for social and racial justice.
The Woman in the Window
Anna Fox lives alone -- a recluse in her New York City home, drinking too much wine, watching old movies ... and spying on her neighbors. Then the Russells move next door: a father, a mother, their teenaged son. The perfect family. But when Anna sees something she shouldn't, her world begins to crumble -- and its shocking secrets are laid bare. In this gripping Hitchcockian thriller, no one and nothing are what they seem.
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
A memoir of the American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants who lived within the traditions and fears of the Chinese past as well as the realities of the alien modern American culture. First published in 1976, it has become a classic in its innovative portrayal of multiple and intersecting identities—immigrant, female, Chinese, American.
The Women
Frank Lloyd Wright’s life is explored through his relationships with four women in this novel narrated by his fictional Japanese apprentice.
The Women in the Castle
Amid the ashes of Nazi Germany's defeat, Marianne von Lingenfels returns to the once-grand castle of her husband's ancestors, an imposing stone fortress now fallen into ruin following years of war. The widow of a resister murdered in the failed July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Marianne plans to uphold the promise she made to her husband's brave conspirators: to find and protect their wives, her fellow resistance widows.
Women of the Silk
Sold into a life of slavery at the Chinese silk factory in the early part of the 20th century, Pei finds friendship and independence amongst the women there despite the horrible conditions.
The World We Found
Four women, inseparable during their university days in 1970s Bombay, reunite when one discovers that she is dying of cancer. The thirty years since they last met, however, has seen their lives changed in ways that none expected.
The World Without Us
A ‘fantasy’ nonfiction book by a science writer that explores what would happen to the earth’s flora and fauna, as well as our built environment, if suddenly all humans disappeared.
The Worst Hard Time
This nonfiction book is a compelling history of the American Dust Bowl of the 1930's, showing how years of heat and drought combined with the destruction of native prairie to cause terrible destruction to the land and misery to the farmers in Oklahoma.
A Yellow Raft in Blue Water
Set on an Indian reservation in Montana, this saga of three generations of Indian women is told from each of their viewpoints and depicts the hardships they encounter both on and off the reservation.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
In an intricate, alternate reality noir detective novel set Alaska where 2 million displaced Jews settled after World War II.
You're Not You
A UW student involved in an unrewarding love affair with a married TA takes a job as a caretaker for a 36-year-old stylish and accomplished woman who is almost completely paralyzed by ALS.
Zeitoun
The story of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath is told through the experiences of Zeitoun, a Syrian-American and Muslim who stays in New Orleans to watch over his home and business. He helps rescue his neighbors, but is later arrested and imprisoned.
The Zookeeper's Wife
The story of Jan Zabinsky, the director of the Warsaw zoo, and his wife Antonina, who sheltered 300 Jews and Polish resisters in the zoo's cages and sheds during WWII.