A movement that began on Twitter and has since expanded to Google groups, Instagram, and posts all over social media; writer Rachel Syme’s book club promoting books about women, by women has taken off, spreading around the Internet and world. Read about the club and movement in this article by Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls. Which biography of an extraordinary woman would you like to add to the list?
amysmartgirls.com – Lately in my Twitter feed I keep seeing the hashtag #wlclub and after a few days of dismissing it, curiosity finally won out and I clicked. What does it stand for? Women’s Lives Club—a virtual book club with participants all from all over the world. February’s book is Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman, a biography of Sylvia Plath.
It’s the brainchild of prolific writer Rachel Syme, where anyone interested in participating can partake in reading a biography of a notable woman each month. I tracked Smart Girl Rachel Syme down via Twitter and asked her all about how this club came to be.
“The funny thing was, I was just on Twitter and I was wasting time as one tends to do. I was writing about paying attention to women’s lives in general, and really casually in a tweet storm, I asked if I were to start a monthly book club about women’s lives, would anyone do it.”
That tweet launched a thousand readers. Or at the very least just over four hundred (the group’s total at last count), but it’s still growing every day. Rachel started a Google group, asking for interested people to email her to be added. And how do the books get chosen? Everyone makes suggestions and Rachel puts the ones that are repeatedly named up to a vote. Next month’s pick, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Thurston by Valerie Boyd, won by a landslide.
Read the rest here.
