So many books, so little time!
At the Vancouver Women Who Read anti-book club, each member reads a thought-provoking book of their own choosing. We meet every month to take turns sharing what we discovered about the world and about ourselves in the process.
Focus is on non-fiction (history, society, politics, science, environment, self-help…) and thought-provoking fiction.
Respect and kindness are expected of all. We all have different tastes, ideas, and inclinations – let’s be welcoming and curious. We can all learn something from each other.
Monthly events include book circles, walk and talk socials, and more.
Learn more about upcoming events and join on the Meetup website. It’s free!
Book Circle – August 18th, 2025
- Ffion: Butter by Asako Yuzuki
- Anna D.: No Second Chances: Women and Political Power in Canada by Kate Graham
- Ania: No New Things by Ashlee Piper
- Anne E.: Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
- Anne V.: Dead Man’s Gold by Paul Yee
- Kelly: The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony
- Shannon: The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits
- Romney: Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick; Hey, Hun by Emily Lynn Paulson
- Brigitte: You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith
- Avital: Julia: A Retelling of George Orwell’s 1984 by Sandra Newman
- Winnie: The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
- Sonia: Unleashing the Soul of Money by Lynne Twist; Want by Anonymous, edited by Gillian Anderson
Book Circle – October 14th, 2026
- Avital — James by Percival Everett
- Avital — Overground Railroad by Candacy Taylor
- Vetta — Your Legacy by James Dobson
- Sharon — One Man in His Time… : A Memoir by Michael Audain
- Eden — Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez
- Tiva — Feeding Ghosts
- Deb — Atomic Habits by James Clear
- Brigitte — Living Beautifully by Pema Chödrön
Book Circle – February 3rd, 2026
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Brigitte: Tête-à-Tête by Hazel Rowley
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Avital: 10 Mistakes That Changed History by Bill Fawcett
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Avital: Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty
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Deb: I Am Enough by Marisa Peer
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Polly: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
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Sonia: The Wise Heart by Jack Kornfield
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Maggie: Meet Me in Bombay by Jenny Ashcroft
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Rashmi: We Are the Baby-Sitters Club by Marisa Crawford & Megan Milks
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Shannon: How to American by Jimmy O. Yang
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Shannon: How to Survive a Bear Attack by Claire Cameron
Book Circle – March 17th, 2026
- Brigitte — How Not to Die (revised and updated) by Michael Greger
- Romey — A Waiter in Paris: Adventures in the Dark Heart of the City by Edward Chisholm
- Ania — Indignity: A Life Reimagined by Lea Ypi
- Anna — Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments by Kenneth Roth; The Long Game by Rachel Reid
- Winnie — Touch by Courtney Maum
- Ingrid — The Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell
- Kelly — Food Intelligence by Kevin Hall & Julia Belluz (author listed as “Justine” in the table — possibly a mix-up)
- Justine — The Hidden History of American Oligarchy by Thom Hartmann (plus another book she couldn’t remember the name of)
- LiNOA — The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge
- Jacqueline — The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture by Gabor Maté
- Shannon — Still Life at Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing by Abigail Thomas
- Deb Jang — Undo It!: How Simple Lifestyle Changes Can Reverse Most Chronic Diseases by Dean and Anne Ornish
Miscellaneous
- Walking with Beth: Conversations with My Hundred-Year-Old Friend by Merilyn Simonds
- Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life by Thomas Moore
- The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal by Afua Cooper
- The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality by Angela Saini
- What Comes Next and How to Like It by Abigail Thomas
Book Circle – April 28th, 2026
- Linda — The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life by Thomas Moore
- Linda — Dark Nights of the Soul by Thomas Moore
- Romney — The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
- Winnie — Dear Life by Alice Munro
- Anna — Generations by Jean M. Twenge
- Anna — A Perfect Day for a Walk (Vancouver) by Bill Arnott
- Ania — Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley
- Persy — Cottages to Community by Francis Mansbridge
- Brigitte — The Astronaut Children of Dunbar Street by Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho
- Rolly — Material World by Ed Conway
- Kelly — By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult
- Linda — The Better Mother by Jen Sookfong Lee
- Shannon — A Perfect Day for a Walk (Vancouver) by Bill Arnott
- Shannon — Tough Guy by Rachel Reid
Book Circle – May 26th, 2026
- Brigitte — Unstoppable Us, Volume 1: How Humans Took Over the World by Yuval Noah Harari
- Brigitte — Unstoppable Us, Vol. 2: Why the World Isn’t Fair by Yuval Noah Harari
- Brigitte — The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo
- Brigitte — Unread: A Memoir of Learning (and Loving) to Read on TikTok by Oliver James
- Brigitte — Departures (movie, not a book)
- Avital — Max in the House of Spies by Adam Gidwitz
- Avital — Max in the Land of Lies by Adam Gidwitz
- Avital — Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell
- Vetta — Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
- Polly — Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt
- Sonia — The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
- Sonia — The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga
- Romney — Your Face Belongs to Us by Kashmir Hill
- Kelly — Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff
Book Circle – June 23rd, 2026
- Avital — Meet Me in Bombay by Jenny Ashcroft
- Avital — Forgotten Warriors by Sarah Percy
- Avital — Hello, Molly! by Molly Shannon
- Marie — The Boys’ Club by Martine Delvaux
- Claira — Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates
- Polly — The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
- Polly — How the World Really Works by Vaclav Smil
- Anna — Seven Fallen Feathers by Tanya Talaga
- Kelly — The Male Brain / The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine
- Winnie — Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman
- Romney — The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
- Brigitte — King, Warrior, Magician, Lover by Robert Moore
- Ffion — A Fate Worse Than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War by W. Fitzhugh Brundage
- Chloé — The Absent Father Effect on Daughters by Susan E. Schwartz, PhD
- Chloé — We Breed Lions: Confronting Canada’s Troubled Hockey Culture by Rick Westhead
Book Circle – July 14th, 2026
- Brigitte — Et la joie de vivre by Gisèle Pelicot
- Tivo — We Will Rise Again by Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, Malka Older
- Anne V. — Enshittification by Cory Doctorow
- Romney — Reader Bot: What Happens When AI Reads, and Why It Matters by Naomi S. Baron
- Anna D. — Free: Two Years, Six Lives, and the Long Journey Home by Lauren Kessler
- Anna D. — An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi
- Chloé M. — Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism by Joseph Heath
- Chloé M. — Children of the Self-Absorbed: A Grown-Up’s Guide to Getting Over Narcissistic Parents by Nina W. Brown
- Marie N. — The Color Purple by Alice Walker
- Winnie — Lies and Weddings by Kevin Kwan
- Lindsey — The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
Added during the discussion:
- The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrère
- Women Who Woke Up the Law: Inside the Cases That Changed Women’s Rights in Canada by Karin Wells
- Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel.
Book Circle – August 11th, 2026 at Winnie’s
- Marie — Trash! A Garbageman’s Story by Simon Paré-Poupart (Memoir) — A twenty-year Montreal garbageman’s funny, sharp account of life on the truck, and what our waste says about us.
- Ania — The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life by Lowry Pressly (Nonfiction / Philosophy) — A case for privacy as something more than data protection — an argument that being unknown, even to ourselves, is essential to a meaningful life.
- Shriya — Spare by Prince Harry (Memoir) — Prince Harry’s account of grief, military service, and life inside (and leaving) the British royal family.
- Chloé — Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton (Graphic Memoir) — A young Nova Scotian cartoonist’s two years working in Alberta’s oil sands, exploring isolation, class, and gender in an extractive industry town.
- Kelly — My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell (Fiction) — A woman revisits her relationship with a much older teacher from her teenage years, as a new allegation against him forces her to reconsider what happened to her.
- Kelly — Even the Good Girls Will Cry by Melissa Auf der Maur (Memoir) — The former Hole and Smashing Pumpkins bassist’s account of coming of age inside 1990s alternative rock.
- Sonia — London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe (Nonfiction / True Crime) — The investigation into a London teenager’s mysterious death, which uncovers a secret double life and the city’s wealthy, corrupt underworld.
- Tiva — The Cold Millions by Jess Walter (Historical Fiction) — Two drifter brothers get swept into the labor and free-speech battles of early-1900s Spokane.
- Winnie — emerge 25 (Writer’s Studio Anthology, various authors) (Anthology / Mixed Genre) — A collection of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction from emerging writers in SFU’s Writer’s Studio program.
Book Circle – September 15th, 2026 at Pacifica
- Brigitte — Pourquoi Trump ne mange pas de tofu by Suzanne Zaccour (Nonfiction / Essay, French) — A feminist essay arguing that toxic masculinity and meat-eating culture are linked, making the case for veganism as a social-justice issue.
- Teresa — Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison (Fiction) — A semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel about a poor Southern family, narrated by a girl caught between her mother’s love and her abusive stepfather.
- Romney — The Arab of the Future by Riad Sattouf (Graphic Memoir) — A cartoonist’s childhood shuttling between rural France, Gaddafi’s Libya, and Assad’s Syria under his ambitious, mercurial father.
- Avital — Pieces You’ll Never Get Back by Samina Ali (Memoir) — A writer nearly dies giving birth, wakes from a coma with her memory and language stripped away, and has to relearn how to live — and reckon with her faith — from scratch.
- Persy — The Story of the Stone (trans. David Hawkes & John Minford) (Classic Chinese Fiction) — The celebrated 18th-century Chinese novel (also known as Dream of the Red Chamber) charting the rise and fall of a great aristocratic family.
- Winnie — Kill Your Boss (US title: The Intern’s Handbook) by Shane Kuhn (Thriller) — A hitman who poses as a corporate intern to get close to his targets takes on one last job that gets complicated by an unexpected romance.
- Polly — Cave in the Snow by Vicki Mackenzie (Biography) — The story of Tenzin Palmo, a British woman who became a Tibetan Buddhist nun and spent twelve years in solitary meditation retreat in a Himalayan cave.
- Polly — The Encampment by Maggie Helwig (Nonfiction) — A Toronto Anglican priest’s account of the unhoused community that formed in her churchyard, and her years-long fight to let it stay.