Friday, May 9, 2008

A bit about EQUIP book club

Welcome to our newly launched EQUIP book club site. After many months of planning, I'm so excited that we're about to start! I'm excited because I love reading, and I love having conversations about the books I read with friends. Now I'll be able to have conversations (of the electronic kind) with many, many more women.

For this first post, I wanted to explain a bit more about how the book club will work. The EQUIP committee have chosen 11 different books that we hope will interest you - they are all books that at least some of us have read and loved and want to share! We've tried to choose a wide range as well - we have a classic (The Pilgrim's Progress), a modern secular novel (The Sunday Philosophy Club), books that relate to the Christian life (Don't Waste your Life), books that are particularly relevant to women (Feminine Appeal and Did I Kiss Marriage Goodbye?), biography (Faithful Women and their Extraordinary God) and many more. As well as choosing them for their diversity, we tried to choose books that would generate good discussions (we won't always agree with everything in the books - and that's okay, except when we read Luke's gospel!!).

While all the books are worth reading, you don't have to read all 11 books to be involved. You can choose the ones that interest you and read along and skip the other ones, or save them for later if you're struggling to read a book a month (I admit it is a big ask for many of us!). Either way, we hope you could use the book club as a motivation to read more (more on that in a later post).

As well as reading along, we'd love it if you commented on the reflections and questions we contribute. We're hoping that our thoughts will work as 'conversation starters', so please join in. It will make it so much more interesting if you get involved and share your thoughts.

The contributors are going to write at least 4 reflections on their book for the month. I'm hoping to post one of these each Monday. As well as checking in on Monday, it will be worth checking in every couple of days for other things that I'll include which relate to the book - eg. interviews, links to articles, poetry, reading lists, book reviews.

You can find our comment policy on the sidebar to the right. I'll be back next week with a post explaining how to comment (it can be more tricky than it sounds sometimes - believe me).

Once again, I'm looking forward to reading along with you, and hearing your thoughts.

8 comments:

Gordon Cheng said...

Yay! Sorry to intrude on your book group, but
I just wanted to say what a great idea I think this is.

May God bless your reading efforts.

Therese said...

I'm really looking forward to it, Nic!
Thanks for talking about it at Equip yesterday. It is a great idea, and the women at our church are very excited about it - looking forward to being encouraged, and to being transformed more into the likeness of Christ.

Anonymous said...

I am really excited about this book club! I am praying it will encourage myself and other women to read and think more! I am always procrastinating about reading Christian books being a great fiction reader!

Erin said...

Yay! I've been waiting for this to start up. I couldn't make it to equip this year :(, but I've been checking back on the book club link for ages waiting for it to start.
Can't wait to begin reading and hearing what other people have to say about the books.

Anonymous said...

This is exciting, Nic! Well done on all the work to get this up and running :)

Looking forward to lots of challenging discussion in the months to come :)

Anonymous said...

Hi,
Can I say how excited I am to join the book club? When I first saw the intro to the b/c on the Equip website earlier in the year, I knew it was for me. Being from nthn NSW can be isolating in some regards and discussions about books (and the issues they raise) are a treat.
You have done an amazing job of selection.
Is reading/commenting all that is necessary to be involved? (no registration process?)
Can't wait to *meet* everyone. (Wasn't Equip great?)
Janelle

EQUIP Book Club said...

Hi Janelle,

There's no registration process... just join in!

Rachael said...

Looking forward to it too!