This story first appeared on The Star's website on February 11, 2025.

Kaite Stover said she loves the idea of strangers from across the metro coming together to talk about a book — she’s been into it since the 1990s when she first learned about The Star’s FYI Book Club. 

“The only common denominator participants had was the book,” she said. “It was serendipitous reading.” 

First, The Star organized the meetings. Later, The Star and the Kansas City Public Library collaborated. Now, the two are relaunching the FYI Book Club as the KC Pop-Up Book Group. 

Stover, the Library’s director of readers’ services and the group’s organizer, has been describing it as a pop-up for years because of the irregular meeting times and places, and because participants change from one meeting to the next.

“I like the element of surprise when I introduce these readers to each other. I love being in a new space, because when I don’t know what the space is, I feel far more energized when I’m leading the discussion,” she explained. 

Andale Gross, The Star’s managing editor, said he’s happy to support an activity that brings people together to discuss ideas and is glad the decades-old partnership will continue. 

“I appreciate that it’s a collaboration promoting both literacy and community,” Gross said. “The library is an important Kansas City institution, and we’re proud to be partnering on such a meaningful project.” 

The Library will work with The Star to select a book that resonates with Kansas Citians; they’ll choose the meeting locations accordingly. Stover suggested the guiding questions will be: “Where does this book fit in Kansas City’s fabric? How do participants weave what they’re reading into where they live?” 

For instance, in 2023, the group met at the National WWI Museum and Memorial to discuss The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris, a nonfiction book about the WWI origins of plastic surgery. 

But one of Stover’s favorite discussions was about a climate thriller called The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi at the Kansas City Water Department in 2015. 

“The deputy director of the water department showed up, and basically the questions he had to answer were: Where does the water go, and where does it come from?” Stover recalled. 

The KC Pop-Up Book Group’s first book selection matches the library’s Big Read, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest. The book for each is Kansas Citian Rebekah Taussig’s Sitting Pretty.

Taussig’s memoir-in-essays is about the joys and challenges of physical human existence, particularly when navigating a world that was not designed with a wheelchair in mind. 

More information about her book and future book group selections is forthcoming. 

JOIN THE GROUP 

The Kansas City Star partners with the Kansas City Public Library to present a book-of-the-moment selection. We invite the community to read along. Kaite Mediatore Stover, the library’s director of readers’ services, will lead a discussion of Rebekah Taussig’s “Sitting Pretty,” at 1 p.m. on Saturday, March 29, at the library’s North-East Branch, 6000 Wilson Ave. Email Stover at kaitestover@kclibrary.org to join.