Women Faculty Book Club

The Women Faculty Book Club at FIU, like so many others, meets to affirm our membership in a community of book lovers. With each work we discuss, we deepen our shared experience, learn more about each other and ourselves, and honor the heritage of women’s creativity across eras and cultures.

For more information about joining the book club, please contact Joyce Peterson at petersoj@fiu.edu.

The date for the November Women Faculty Book Club is Sunday, November 18, at 7 p.m. As usual, we gratefully accept the hospitality offered by Judith Stiehm and meet at her home (call Judith for admission to the building). Please see prior WomBook Mailing List email for details.

Find below a listing of the AY 2018-19 Women Faculty Book Club books, or browse our picks from previous years back to 1991. The past-year publications encompass our chosen record of women’s writing over more than 25 years. We hope you find it a useful guide to leisure reading.

Spring 2019

Sunday, February 10th, The book is She Would Be King by Mayetu Moore.

We will meet at the home of Judith Stiehm at 7pm. For entrance to the building, please call Judith. Her phone number and address can be found on the Jan. 21 WomBook listserve email (12:57pm) from Marilyn Hoder-Salmon. The cover article of the January 13th New York Times Book Review is an essay on "four novels by African women writers," including Moore's novel (see link below):

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/books/review/jennifer-nansubuga-makumbi-kintu.html

Turning the ‘Curse of Ham’ Into a Blessing - The New York Times

www.nytimes.com

Though she ironically alludes to Ham in an epigraph from the 19th-century explorer John Hanning Speke — “I profess accurately to describe naked Africa … a striking existing proof of the Holy ...

January 13 - The January meeting was cancelled and rescheduled for Feb. 10.

See below for more information about the Women Faculty Book Club!

Women Faculty Book Club bookmark, 3rd edition. Follow link "View or download..." for PDF version of full bookmark or follow the link "Past years" for past book listings.

View or download our bookmark with past books list

January 2019
Sunday, January 13

(The December meeting has been cancelled as many people will be out of town.)

The next meeting of the Book Club is scheduled for Sunday, January 13, 2019.

The book we chose for January, following a recommendation from Ophelia Weeks, is She Would Be King by Wayetu Moore, "an ambitious and expansive novel that explores the nuances of Liberian history beyond its identity as a settlement for emancipated African-Americans. Ms. Moore skillfully reconsiders the idealism of the early African-American settlers through their interactions with the indigenous peoples and braids together intimate story lines centered around universal themes: falling in love defying familial expectations and the difficulties of doing the right thing." (Review by Lovia Gyarkye in the New York Times, September 22, 2018.)
November 2018
November 18

Our November book choice is Transcription by Kate Atkinson.Transcription tells the story of Juliet Armstrong, recruited as a young woman by British intelligence agency MI5 to transcribe recorded phone conversations of suspected fifth columnists during World War II. "There is in this novel, as in all of Ms. Atkinson's, a sense of absurd predicament expressed in wonderful comic set pieces filled with material detail and running jokes. Often enough they involve complacently held, patronizing assumptions about the role of women, assumptions that persist in even ludicrously extreme situations." Wall Street Journal, Saturday/Sunday, September 22, 2018, p. C10

Please make plans to joins us for our November meeting at the home of Judith Stiehm (see WomBook emails for details).
October 2018
October 21

Our reading selection for October is Florida by Lauren Groff. Florida is a collection of short stories about which reviewer Christine Schutt says "Lauren Groff is a great storyteller" whose stories are "full of event and surprise, instruction and comfort." Set mostly in our state of Florida, a state with the menace of "snakes, sinkholes, panthers, storms that strike windows with personal animus." How could we resist!
Summer to September 2018
An occasional column in the New York Times entitled “The Enthusiast” inspired our theme for summer reading. In "The Enthusiast" different writers offer their “enthusiasm” for a writer they consider underappreciated and who deserves a more extended readership. Some were long out-of-print and recently reissued as Virago or NYRB Classics. We have chosen 5, some from "The Enthusiast" and some we have added - all by 20th century British women.

Please read at least one from this list.