Each year Madison Public Library partners with UW-Madison to extend the perennially popular Go Big Read program into the broader community.
Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body by Rebekah Taussig has been selected as the 2024-2025 Go Big Read book.
Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Rebekah Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), inspirational (Helen Keller), or angelic (Forrest Gump). None of this felt right; and as she got older, she longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling.
Writing about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn’t fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life.
Disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. By exploring this truth in poignant and lyrical essays, Taussig illustrates the need for more stories and more voices to understand the diversity of humanity. Sitting Pretty challenges us as a society to be patient and vigilant, practical and imaginative, kind and relentless, as we set to work to write an entirely different story.
Currently Available: Storytelling Maker Kits
Drawing Pretty: The View from the ArtWorking Body
If you've been in one of our library locations lately, you may have come across this beautiful Go Big Read maker kit designed by National Velvet (aka Oliver) and their colleagues at ArtWorking, a Madison area nonprofit program that provides career development and support for artists and entrepreneurs with disabilities. The kit is all about telling your own story and was inspired by Sitting Pretty. The kit - titled Drawing Pretty: The View from the ArtWorking Body - includes lots of prompts and is designed to encourage patrons of all ages to make their own story into a zine.
We're grateful to the Friends of Madison Public Library for their help in assembling the 1,000 kits that you can pick up NOW from each of our nine library locations (and the Dream Bus), as well as to Go Big Read who provided the funding to create the kits. Stop in to get yours - it makes a great cozy craft for the winter months, or could be a collaborative project to share with family during the holidays, too!
Book Availability
Book Club Kits for the 2024-25 UW-Madison Go Big Read selection will be available to check out beginning Monday, September 9 . Please call the Central Library at 608-266-6300 to reserve a kit.
Individual copies of Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body by Rebekah Taussig in print, eBook, and eAudiobook can be requested using LINKCat. You can also read or listen online using the Libby app.
About the Author
Rebekah Taussig, who has been paralyzed since the age of three, is a mom, wife, author, disability advocate and educator with a Ph.D in creative nonfiction and disability studies. Before pivoting to writing, speaking, and consulting, Taussig taught passionately for almost a decade from freshmen in high school to upper-level college classes and continues to offer writing workshops. She is also one hell of a fighter on a mission to show that disabled people have incredible value; as she argues, a more inclusive world is a sturdier, kinder, more imaginative world for all of us.
