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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 We've made it easier for you by collecting donated and withdrawn copies of discussible books and putting all the copies in a canvas bag.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 400 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 608-266-6300 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
Belong to Me
The intertwined stories of three women in suburban Philadelphia: newly arrived Cornelia searching for a new life; judgmental, perfectionist Piper struggling with her best friend's cancer; and elusive, free-spirited Lake.
Crescent
An Iraqi-American is the chef at a small Los Angeles café, where Arab-Americans come to feel at home. A folkloric family story is interwoven with this contemporary tale of love, food and home.
Olive Kitteridge
This ‘novel in stories,’ set in small town Maine, centers on Olive Kitteridge, a difficult-to-like retired teacher and her friends and acquaintances. Together they reveal their follies, foibles, difficulties and capacity for change.
A Mercy
The personal costs of slavery are explored in this novel of 4 abandoned women together on a farm in upstate New York.
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.
Away
Lillian Leyb, survivor of a Russian massacre, immigrates to New York in 1924. Upon learning her 3-year-old daughter may still be alive, she journeys across North America through the Yukon wilderness and over the Bering Strait to find her.
Call Me By Your Name
Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera. Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference. But during the restless summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them.
Loving Frank
A fictionalized portrayal of Mamah Borthwick Cheney, her love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright, and the scandal it created.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Kingsolver and her family eat only local food for a year, including home-raised turkeys and chickens and garden grown and canned veggies.
For Keeps: Women Tell the Truth About Their Bodies, Growing Older, and Acceptance
In a series of essays, women writers of all ages discuss the impact of time and illness on their bodies and the process of taking control of their body image.
Run
Adoption, race, class, and family are explored in this novel about three brothers and their widowed father.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
A humorous, gritty, autobiographical novel of a budding cartoonist, who leaves his troubled school on a Spokane Indian reservation to attend an all-white town school.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Sweet ghetto nerd Oscar dreams of being a famous writer… and of falling in love. He may not get either wish, due to a curse that’s dominated his Dominican family for generations. A Pulitzer Prize winner.
The Double Bind
A literary thriller with a tricky, intriguing premise and a fictional backdrop from The Great Gatsby begins with the attempted rape and murder of a young woman bicyclist on a rural Vermont road and involves the mysterious past of a homeless man.
The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story
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.
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
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.
I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
A candid, wry, amusing collection of essays on women getting older and dealing with the tribulations of maintenance, menopause, empty nests---and life itself.
The Virgin of Small Plains
The discovery of the naked frozen body of a beautiful teenage girl during a 1987 Kansas blizzard and the subsequent disappearance of the son of a judge begin this novel with surprising twists and a convincing portrait of small town life.
The Book Thief
Narrated by Death, this novel for adults and teens tells the story of Liesl Memeinger, a German girl living through the Holocaust who finds strength and wisdom in the books she steals.