70 Books Like The Book Club for Troublesome Women

While the crimes committed against the Mennonite women in this story are the catalyst, I love this book because it shows the power of collective action when it is harnessed by women.

The women, who generally are so unworldly and governed by a paternalistic social structure, find their voice in the secret meeting they conduct in the hayloft. I find their debates fascinating.

In a modern context, it seems impossible that the women could forgive the injustice and violence done to them, but it is their faith that compels the possibility of such an outcome. Despite their illiteracy, the discussion is wise, even heated and fierce. It is their innate sense of democracy, rightness, and justice that brings me back to this book again and again.

A dear friend gave me this book when I started writing – it’s precious to me because he knew it would encourage me to find my voice.

It is the ultimate companion text for a female writer. I have been inspired by Virginia Woolf’s work to become a writer myself, to find a room of my own. Spanning decades, Woolf sent the message that a woman will battle the externally imposed silence on her imagination and her choices, and, with her own physical and metaphorical room, she can create literary greatness. 

Or not – she may simply create her own story. But it will be hers.

This has been my favourite book since I read it as a child.

I love Jane’s courage in the face of adversity, both in her childhood and as a woman. It is her moral compass that guides her through her life, determining the rightness and wrongness of situations. She grows up in a world that believes she should be silent and accept the single path offered to her.

The message in the book emboldened me as I grew up and had to make decisions to challenge the expected norms. I can’t help but find joy in the cyclic nature of the love story here. In patience, in steadfastness, she finds love and does not lose herself in the process.

In the 2024 American Presidential election, Kamala Harris faced stultifying criticism of her intellect, her motives, and her integrity, but she never gave in to it. She used her voice.

In this book, she chronicles the 107 days that lead to the election. I love her honesty in this diarized journey to what was ultimately a defeat. She writes so compellingly about the pain of losing and the humility required to face that defeat. I felt her pain and her shock at the outcome.

But I also admired the resonating power of her dignity. Few women have experienced such public condemnation based on lies and schoolyard bullying, but she showed me in this book that one can, and always should, rise above it, stay true to oneself, and keep one’s voice.

Though written in the 1930s, Am I a Redundant Human Being? was not published until 2001, several decades after Hartwig’s death in 1967 (the English translation appeared in 2010).

The novel’s narrator, Aloisia Schmidt, reflects on her desire for external validation and a more exciting life, as well as the constant feeling of invisibility. Though she is only about thirty in 1930 Vienna, her ambition is constrained by disappointment, and the coming decade promises more of the same. 

First of all, isn't that an awesome title? This narrative is a child-appropriate and compelling description of Mildred and Richard Loving and their path to the Supreme Court. The two got married in D.C. in 1958, when interracial marriage was illegal in their home state of Virginia. Returning home after the wedding, they were arrested, jailed, and told to leave the state. They took their case to court arguing that Virginia's ban on interracial marriage violated the Constitution, and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed. As described in the back matter, the creators of this book themselves have an interracial marriage. An author's note reflects on their lives and their perspective on the Lovings' story. 

Though not published until 2002, after Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. purchased and authenticated the manuscript, the autobiographical novel The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts is widely considered the first book known to have been written by a fugitive enslaved woman. Crafts was the author’s pseudonym, and the novel, estimated to have been written in 1858, parallels the life of Hannah Bond, a woman who is documented to have escaped enslavement on a North Carolina plantation and who, like the novel’s protagonist, eventually settled in New Jersey. The preface and introduction of the published book read like a mystery adventure as Professor Gates reveals his multifaceted strategies to identify the real-life author and the real-life characters of her book.

The death toll of the Civil War was horrendous, the list of the wounded? Endless. Medical schools did not exist; doctor trained their assistants. There were no emergency rooms, no hospitals, no triage, and certainly no female nurses to care for those bleeding male bodies. In many respects, the medical profession was born on Civil War battlefields with the brave women who ventured among the dead and dying to staunch the flow of blood. So, who were the women who emerged from their sheltered lives to care for wounded soldiers in the Northern army? I wrote about one of them—Nellie Chase—but I thought she was an exception. These stories of the women who joined the Northern war effort expanded my knowledge beyond my wildest expectations.

This was one of the first archaeology books I was assigned when I started studying archaeology, and I only appreciate it more and more with time. I don’t think there is any book the captures so well the fact that real archaeologists actually learn much more from everyday, mundane objects—rather than from the monuments and treasures that archaeology in the movies is all about. 

I still remember, too, the moment this book made it ‘click’ for me that archaeology often reveals secrets that contradict the written record. A plantation owner might say, for instance, that they designed and built their house, but they can’t hide the existence of the front porch and other traces of African architectural and construction techniques.

My copy of this book is riddled with nearly 20-year-old post-it notes, each one representing an epiphany for a budding archaeologist just ahead of her first summer of excavation.

If you like reading fast action and involved mysteries, you’ll enjoy Patricia Cromwell’s novel, Isle of Dogs. This action-packed story delves into the historical plots surrounding a small island off the coast of Virginia, where it is said ancestors of long-ago pirates reside, and to this day a sunken treasure remains at the bottom of the sea off their shores. The Governor of Virginia decides to build speed bumps on the small island where the preferred mode of transportation is golf carts. Disarrays begin, so State Trooper Andy Brazel is assigned to investigate and discovers a gang’s intentions to raid the island in search of the treasure.