About UsIt all began with Book Club. We read and discussed a book a week in a group that began several years ago. All of us were women, several home with young children. Six of us became interested in writing and formed a writing group. While remaining active in the larger book discussion group, we met weekly to discuss and exchange feedback on personal writing projects, including novels, poetry, and memoir. We also began a collaborative project -- a book that would contain sketches of one hundred of the best books we had read in Book Club.Several things prompted us to put such a book together:
- Concern about the growing tendency to characterize Romance Novels as "Women's Fiction."
- Belief that information about good reading -- about serious fiction, in particular -- was not readily accessible. We remembered our own confusion about what to read before joining Book Club, and we all had friends and acquaintances who relied on us for reading suggestions.
- Belief in the transformative power of good literature -- its potential to facilitate self understanding as well as to provide insight into lives different from one's own.
Our group began the project with great enthusiasm. We selected titles, polished the sketches, and deliberated over quotes. Job demands and family priorities, however, allowed the project to drift into the background of busy lives where it languished several years.
During the 90s the idea surfaced again. This time, however, we'd try a different format -- a quarterly publication. Each issue would be brief, so that readers could spend their reading time reading books. To avoid the possibility of commercial influence on recommendations, there would be no advertising. We would have a generous selection of titles from which to choose and, in an ongoing publication, we would be able to include new and current books among our recommendations.
Though the list of recommendations is appropriate for both men and women, we chose the title Reading Woman in an effort to claim for women an identity as intelligent and wide-ranging readers, an identity belied by much advertising and promotion that targets women and assumes their interests to be quite narrow.
We wanted readers, when choosing a book by an unfamiliar author, to have something on which to base a decision -- an alternative to judging books by covers. Reading Woman was a helpful guide to the world of excellent books.
We've helped thousands of people choose great books with our "grass roots" recommendations, and now we're making those recommendations available to everyone.
We are also offering a complete set of the original issues. It's a unique collector's item and only a limited number are available.
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