Readers tend to get acquainted by examining each other’s bookshelves. Abby Yellman hasn’t quite filled her office’s bookcase, but she would very much like her coworkers – and patrons – to get to know her.  

So, the Library’s new chief executive – also a new Kansas City Public Library cardholder – is sharing her reading lists.  

Yellman says how she determines what to read is often mood-based, but some strategy is involved, too.  

“It’s a mood,” she says, “but it’s also about where I am in my life. Recognizing what your areas of growth are and knowing you can learn from both fiction and nonfiction. My goals are self-awareness and self-improvement.”

Kaite Stover, director of readers’ services, says Yellman’s lists speak volumes.

“I am so happy that our director reads widely. Abby is in touch with what most other voracious readers have read like Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles and Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick,” Stover explains, “but she’s also reading Matthew Desmond and Eyal Press.”

In 2016, MacArthur “genius” Grant winner Desmond spoke about his book, Evicted, at a Library event. In 2022, the Library hosted a traveling exhibition based on that book. The book and the exhibition, which was on loan from the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., worked to make the nation’s eviction crisis more three-dimensional – literally, in the exhibition’s case.

“Her selections of Desmond and Press tell me that she’s not only got her finger on the pulse of popular literature,” Stover says, “but is actively seeking information and narratives about today’s major social issues.”  

When Yellman thinks back on her childhood reading habits – her home library was Alliance Public Library in Nebraska – she remembers Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder; she says the pioneering spirit was “a big deal” where she grew up. Yellman also recognizes it was challenging as a young child to find diversity within the pages of the books available at her library.  

 It was books like Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell that spoke to her own adventurous spirit and exposed her to experiences unlike her own.  

“I am proud of where I came from and relate well to farm life and a strong work ethic, and I also realize I had to move away to truly appreciate the diversity this world has to offer us if we are open to it,” she says.

When Yellman’s daughters, Laura and Maddy, were young children, she read them the Skippyjon Jones books by Judith Byron Schachner, the Pete the Cat books by James Dean and Eric Litwin, Llama Llama Red Pajama by Anna Dewdney, and then graduated to more serious books like The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak.  

But right now, the director has Banned Books Week on her mind – September 22-28 – and she highly values its message. Yellman says, “One challenge I have for myself is to read every book on the banned books list – a list where our comfort is challenged, and where we can learn the most.”    

Books that transformed Abby Yellman’s thinking:

• Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley
• Dare to Lead by Brené Brown
• Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America by Eyal Press
• Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond
• Educated by Tara Westover

Favorite Reads:

• The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
• The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
• The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
• We Begin at the End by Chris Whitaker
• Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick

Recent Reads:

• Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry
• Middle of the Night by Riley Sager
• Never Lie by Freida McFadden
• First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston
• Walking with the Wind by John Lewis