Gender Book Club Adds Summer Months, Releases Book List

Gender Book Club Adds Summer Months, Releases Book List

By: Katherine Thelen

The gender book club has many new announcements about additional meetings and the books selected for up coming months. Originally the group planed to go on hiatus for the summer but there was high interest from club members to continue through June, July and August. Group moderator Patti Thelen agreed to make the meetings year round. The books selected for the warmer days are shorter in length to accommodate busier schedules.

In other club news, March’s book pick was How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran, it is part humorous autobiography, part feminist manifesto. The book covers all the basic, if not often discussed, details of the female existence. No topic is off limits from bodily hair removal and what to call her breasts to a very powerful chapter on abortion. This is truly a book were the humor makes the hard truths go down easier.

April’s selection is a new release, Redefining Realness by Janet Mock. The Amazon book review shares that in 2011, Marie Claire magazine published a profile of Janet Mock in which she stepped forward for the first time as a trans woman. Those twenty-three hundred words were life-altering for the People.com editor, turning her into an influential and outspoken public figure and a desperately needed voice for an often voiceless community. In these pages, she offers a bold and inspiring perspective on being young, multicultural, economically challenged, and transgender in America.

Beyond spring, some books for the summer have already been selected. In June the group will read and discuss The Letter Q: Queer Writers’ Notes to Their Younger Selves. In this anthology, sixty-three award-winning authors such as Michael Cunningham, Amy Bloom, Jacqueline Woodson, Gregory Maguire, David Levithan, and Armistead Maupin make imaginative journeys into their pasts, telling their younger selves what they would have liked to know then about their lives as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender. These are words of love and understanding, reasons to hold on for the better future ahead. They will tell you things about your favorite authors that you never knew before.

 September’s book by author of The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides, is Middlesex. This is a longer book, so it was decided to let everyone know about it a few months in advance. The fiction novel covers over eight decades of a family to land at the adolescence of one teenage girl, or is she? Read the book to find out and come to the September book club meeting to hear what everyone else thinks about the novel too.

The Gender Book club meets every third Thursday of the month at the Network, 7 pm. Join us on April 17th at 7:00pm to discuss Redefining Realness and help select the book to read in May.  If you are new to the club, don’t be intimated because you didn’t read the book, you can still join in the conversation.