What’s So Special About a WILPF Book Club?

by Gloria McMillan
Tucson WILPF

September 2022

I’m Gloria ("Glo"), with a suggestion to all my well-read WILPF friends. How many times has somebody cited a text during a WILPF meeting that you later forgot to read? Reading belongs to the people, not just “experts” and is a part of our inclusionary work via creative and activist literacy!

Reading brings people’s stories to light by embodying values. Reading books and having illuminating discussions with WILPF members can be an aid to our collective action. So I’m proposing that we start a virtual WILPF book club. I am a bibliophile and happy to coordinate this Zoom-based WILPF Book Club to start us off.

WILPF members, I know you have more creativity in naming than “The Book Club,” so we’re open to names. Contact BookClub@wilpfus.org with your ideas.

Among exciting trends in literature are the BIPOC writers who are writing their own take on classic novels: Femi Osofisan’s Tegonni: An African Antigone (original by Sophocles). Or how about Wide Sargasso Sea — a 1966 novel by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys. The novel serves as a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847). Nigerian American science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor’s Hugo Award-winning novel Binti (2015) is a short but powerful ride into Afro-futurism. Multi-faceted Indian writer and former UN Undersecretary Shashi Tharoor wrote a humorous novel about colonialism and Indian lit: The Great Indian Novel (1989).

Or how about the short story where Ray Bradbury takes on US racism, nuclear war, and imperialism’s payback, “The Rocks Cried Out”? Or Magic Realist classics like One Hundred Years of Solitude by Mexican writer Gabriel García Márquez. There are more possibilities than space here permits, as well as those books known to you and not to me! And this is just fiction.

Besides the benefits of fiction for a book club, many new histories like Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire: What Britain Did to India (2017) and William Darity’s 2020 text on slavery and reparations, From Here to Equality, offer new lenses for understanding how the past has shaped us and placed us in today’s world.

So – pause for breath here – we can choose from many excellent books, fiction and/or non-fiction.  What is your preference, if any? Again, if interested, contact me at BookClub@wilpfus.org. Thanks for your consideration!