When people think LIBRARY, they think “books”. When books think LIBRARY, we worry about books turning sentient. However, when I think library, I think programming, and a classic all-time library program: the humble book club. Mead offers a variety of excellent book clubs that suit many tastes and schedules. Here’s a list of the book clubs we’re currently running. Click the title to see the calendar listing for fall quarter meeting timings, locations, and books:
What to do if none of the clubs are appealing? Or what if they appeal greatly but the timing doesn’t work? The public at large may be interested to learn that Mead Library has several dozen circulating book kits. Book kits contain 6 or 12 books so anyone with a Monarch card can easily acquire enough copies of the same title for a good-sized book discussion. Book kit checkouts go for 28 days with the possibility of renewing twice. All you need to do is decide where to meet and what to snack on while discussing. Below, I listed several titles that make for great conversations whether the desired vibe is super serious or light and fluffy. Descriptions provided by Goodreads. All titles are linked to their respective book kit listing in the Monarch catalog:
Transcendent Kingdom (2020) by Yaa Gyasi
Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.
But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family’s loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief–a novel about faith, science, religion, love.
Gender Queer (2019) by Maia Kobabe
In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity—what it means and how to think about it—for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.
*Please note this book was targeted by bigots across the country and right here in Sheboygan under the guise of “protecting children” a few years ago. The bigots admitted to never actually reading this book, just cherry-picking images they deemed inflammatory. I don’t think it’s controversial for me to declare reading any book in full is crucial to understanding words and images in their intended context. I would like to take this opportunity to encourage anyone with a curious and compassionate mind to read this book. It’s one of the best autobiographical graphic novels ever published and deserves the attention of eyes unclouded by hate.
Hidden Valley Road (2020) by Robert Kolker
Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don’s work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins—aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony—and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?
What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations.
The Library Book (2018) by Susan Orlean
On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm. As one fireman recounted, “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’” The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who?
Hogfather: A Novel of Discworld (1996) by Terry Pratchett
It’s the night before Hogswatch. And it’s too quiet.
Where is the big jolly fat man? Why is Death creeping down chimneys and trying to say Ho Ho Ho? The darkest night of the year is getting a lot darker…
Susan the gothic governess has got to sort it out by morning, otherwise there won’t be a morning. Ever again…
Here is a variety of additional book kit titles currently available in the Monarch catalog:
The Round House (2013) by Louise Erdrich
The City We Became (2020) by N.K. Jemisin
The Feather Thief (2018) by Kirk Johnson
A Bad Day for Sunshine (2020) by Darynda Jones
The Changeling (2017) by Victor LaValle
Circe (2018) by Madeline Miller
Women Talking (2019) by Miriam Toews
The Underground Railroad (2016) by Coleson Whitehead
And that’s just the tip of the book kit iceberg. Mead has well over one hundred book kit titles waiting for deployment into your life and brain. Search the catalog for “kits” in the format field, and limit target audience to “adult” to see the list. Why yes, we also have book kits aimed at younger audiences, if that is of interest to you parent and teacher types. For help requesting material of any type, or to learn more about book kits and other services do not hesitate to call us up at 920-459-3400 option 4. If you’re like me, and resent having to read on a schedule and therefore have no interest in starting your own book club, may I direct your attention to Mead’s Your Next Five Books service instead. Happy reading.
-Molly
Mead Public Library Blog 