Babes + Books is the the official Book Club of Babes Who Hustle. The bi-monthly virtual book club features woman-written, woman-focused books of various genres. Read on for our 2021 reading list, and be sure to sign up!

How do I join?

  1. Sign up as a member here

  2. Request to join the Babes + Books Facebook group here

  3. Join each Zoom meeting via this link!

2023 Reading List:

 

Bad Sex, Nona Willis Aronowitz 
Monday, January 30, 2023
8-9:30 PM EST

At thirty-two years old, everything in Nona’s life, and in America, was in disarray. Her marriage was falling apart. Her nuclear family was slipping away. Her heart and libido were both in overdrive. Embroiled in an era of fear, reckoning, and reimagining, her assumptions of what “sexual liberation” meant were suddenly up for debate. In the thick of personal and political turmoil, Nona turned to the words of history’s sexual revolutionaries—including her late mother, early radical pro-sex feminist Ellen Willis. At a time when sex has never been more accepted and feminism has never been more mainstream, Nona asked herself: What, exactly, do I want? And are my sexual and romantic desires even possible amid the horrors and bribes of patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy?

 
 

Thick: And Other Essays, Tressie McMillan Cottom
Monday, March 27, 2023
8-9:30 PM EST

In eight highly praised treatises on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom―award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed―is unapologetically "thick": deemed "thick where I should have been thin, more where I should have been less," McMillan Cottom refuses to shy away from blending the personal with the political, from bringing her full self and voice to the fore of her analytical work. Thick "transforms narrative moments into analyses of whiteness, black misogyny, and status-signaling as means of survival for black women" (Los Angeles Review of Books) with "writing that is as deft as it is amusing" (Darnell L. Moore).

 
 

The Woman With the Knife, Gu Byeong-Mo
Monday, May 15, 2023
8-9:30 PM EST

The kinetic story of a sixty-five-year-old female assassin who faces an unexpected threat in the twilight of her career—this is an international bestseller and the English language debut from an award-winning South Korean author. At sixty-five, Hornclaw is beginning to slow down. She lives modestly in a small apartment, with only her aging dog, a rescue named Deadweight, to keep her company. There are expectations for people her age—that she'll retire and live out the rest of her days quietly. But Hornclaw is not like other people. She is an assassin.

 
 

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,
Gabrielle Zevin
Monday, July 31, 2023
8-9:30 PM EST

In this exhilarating novel by the best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

 
 

The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina, Zoraida Córdova
Monday, Sept 25, 2023
8-9:30 PM EST

The Montoyas are used to a life without explanations. They know better than to ask why the pantry never seems to run low, or why their matriarch won’t ever leave their home in Four Rivers—not for graduations, weddings, or baptisms. But when Orquídea Divina invites them to her funeral and to collect their inheritance, they hope to learn the secrets that she has held onto so tightly their whole lives. Instead, Orquídea is transformed into a ceiba tree, leaving them with more questions than answers.

 
 

Bad Cree, Jessica Johns
Monday, November 27, 2023
8-9:30 PM EST

In this gripping, horror-laced debut, a young Cree woman’s dreams lead her on a perilous journey of self-discovery that ultimately forces her to confront the toll of a legacy of violence on her family, her community and the land they call home.

"A mystery and a horror story about grief, but one with defiant hope in its beating heart." —Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Pallbearers Club