CURRENTLY READING
Sitting Pretty by Rebekah Taussig
Monday, May 12 through Friday, May 23, 2025
Read by Michele Gerard Good
UW Madison’s 2024-2025 Go Big Read! 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. Disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one some point or another in our lives. 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.
LISTENER ADVISORY: This book contains language which listeners may find offensive.
THEME: “Beautiful” by Christina Aguilera, Linda Perry, composer; RCA
(HarperOne; ISBN10: 0062936808)
Readings are archived for one week following the broadcast day of the last chapter due to publisher 
copyright restrictions.
Latest Episodes
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Sitting Pretty 7 of 10 – Output = Value
Rebekah soon leaves Sam and sets out to live on her own. But when she takes steps to support herself, things quickly become complicated. She takes a full time teaching […]
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Sitting Pretty 6 of 10 – The Price Of Your Body
Rebekah learns early on how expensive it is to treat her paralysis and all the complications that go along with it. As her 23rd birthday approaches and she creeps ever […]
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Sitting Pretty 5 of 10 – The Real Citizens of Life
Rebekah learned early on that she wasn’t important because she never saw herself represented in film, on tv, or in books as anything other than monstrous, inspirational or angelic. She […]
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Sitting Pretty 4 of 10 – Small Triumphs
Rebekah celebrates some of the small triumphs of her first class. After some debate, she decides to teach another term and uses the issues and obstacles raised in the first […]
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Sitting Pretty 3 of 10 – On Line Dating / Class in Session
Following her divorce from Sam, Rebekah tries on line dating where she meets Micah and falls in love. Rebekah becomes frustrated when her attempts to teach her students the social […]
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Coming Next
Passing Strange by Martha A. Sandweiss
monday, may 26 through friday, june 20, 2025
Read by melvin hinton
Clarence King was a late 19th-century celebrity, a brilliant scientist and explorer once described by Secretary of State John Hay as “the best and brightest of his generation.” But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent family in Newport: for thirteen years he lived a double life – the first as himself, and a second as the black Pullman porter and steelworker named James Todd. How did this fair, blue-eyed son of a wealthy China trader pass across the color lines? And drove him in this post-Civil War era to risk his fortune and reputation?
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