Experts Tell Us the Best Feminist Books For Book Clubs

The book that stimulated the most interesting and robust conversation in our book club was Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor. This is a translated book from a debut Mexican author that made some waves for its gruesome depictions of violence. However, readers will be compelled by the compulsive style of the writing and the striking commentary on misogyny. It’s not a fun read but an absolutely riveting one.

This book discusses unconscious mistakes that women make that sabotage their careers. Frankel offers very practical advice on how to overcome these mistakes and create the career you’ve always dreamed of. Not only does she dive into everyday mistakes professional women make, but gives very concrete, realistic steps on how to combat these issues.

This is a practical guide on how women can transform their money mindset to create a life of abundance. Sincero dives deep into why we have the current money mindset we have and how we can change it. She opens the reader’s mind to new possibilities of money. This book also includes journal prompts, affirmations, and meditations around finances.

Authored by feminist writer Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist is a compilation of essays all about feminism. It has everything from political speeches all the way to competitive Scrabble. This book is filled with tons of insights on the feminist revolution throughout the years. It has a light mood, it is witty, and it is incredibly inspiring.

Daughter of Black Lake was my favorite novel of 2020. Historical fiction all the way back to the Iron Age, this fascinating novel features two powerful women characters…a mother and daughter named Devout and Hobble. I haven’t read a story this old since reading The Clan of the Cave Bear, The Red Tent, and the Bible.

The Sleeping Dictionary is the story of Pom, who lives with her family in a small village by the sea. Her family is very poor, but she feels secure and well loved until a tidal wave wipes out her whole village and her family. Completely alone and helpless in 1930s India, Pom is a survivor. She ends up at a British boarding school, where she is renamed as Sarah and begins working as a maid. Still very young, she next finds herself in the city of Kharagpur, lured into prostitution at a high-class brothel. As an Indian girl without a family, she has few options for survival. She desperately tries to cling to her dignity in the midst of her despair at being forced to sell her body, and she continues to nurture dreams of becoming a teacher. Pom/Sarah/Kamala is a strong, spunky Indian female, and I found myself rooting for her immediately and throughout her story. Faced with desperately difficult choices in her life, she does the best she can with what is given to her. While she is certainly a victim many times in her life, she has no privilege to wallow in misery and self-pity, but time after time she finds ways to rise above her difficult circumstances.

My #1 nonfiction read for 2020. Real American is a book, like Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, that all people need to read…or even better, listen to, which is how I absorbed this beautiful and heart-breaking memoir. New York Times bestselling author Lythcott-Haims was born to a white (British) mother and a Black American father. All her life she never felt like she fit into either race, beginning in kindergarten when her friend asked, What are you? This is such an important book. I’m featuring Lythcott-Haims on my podcast too! She’s better known for her books How to Raise an Adult and Your Turn, about how to help young people become adults, and about her reflections from working as a dean for Stanford University.

I loved this collection of badass frontier women! As a fan of Abigail Scott Duniway (Oregon’s suffragette), I was grateful to see her in this collection. Monson curated and told stories of women of color and all sorts of walks of life. It’s a truly intersectional collection of women who were tough, hearty, fearless, and ground-breaking. These stories will make you want to know more about these daring pioneer women and might make you feel tired, looking at your own life!

Unspeakable Acts is an excellent, well researched dive into the world of feminist art in the 1970s and how pioneering female artists portrayed the near universal experience of sexual harassment and assault in the era of second wave feminism. From Judy Chicago to Adrian Piper, the book explores some of the most radical, shocking artworks of the last century.

This is a book for women who don’t want to be silenced or sidelined. It is for women who want to claim space without apology and be their own damn superhero-fierce women in control who makes things happen. This hug-kick-thunderclap of a book, with an enclosed discussion guide, introduces your book club to space claiming in five dimensions – physically, emotionally, professionally, collaboratively, and intersectionally. Practical and transformative, it creates conversations around what it means to claim space, how we can best support all women and create opportunities for all to claim space, how we can address self-sabotaging thoughts like impostor syndrome, or how we can deal with microaggressions.

Chang pulls the curtains wide open on the male-dominated Silicon Valley board rooms; an industry that holds extraordinary power over all of our lives. It exposes the harassment and the gender discriminition by women who risked their careers (and some; their lives) to share the truth behind the Silicon door. Chang ends by showing everyone how to end this toxic bro culture for good. A phenomenal read for all women and very much a discussion ignitor.