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Some of you may think I overthink my reading schedule since Ashley shared it in all it’s organizational goodness last week, but I don’t think so.  I think I decided once, and now, when I forget what I’ve decided, there’s a record, with the reasoning behind it to keep me on track.  Is there plenty I do overthink?  Most definitely, case in point – I’m an enneagram 6w5 who is pursuing health, but that 6 committee is no joke!  If you overthink things too on occasion, or just don’t want to start, join us in reading Don’t Overthink It: Make Easier Decisions, Stop Second-Guessing, and Bring More Joy To Your Life by Anne Bogel and then join us for Virtual Book Club on Friday, March 26th at 7:30 p.m. CST.   Sign up here to get the details in your inbox!

Want to know something we do overthink sometimes?  No.  Cool, I’m going to tell you anyway – the loose themes we bring to the blog.  You want to know what we didn’t overthink this week?  This month’s loose theme for the blog!  March is Women’s History Month and we are excited to be reading and bringing you stories by women, about women, but not necessarily historical.  As is our habit, we combed the holds lists to see what titles would fit our desire to focus on women this month, be interesting to both of us, and interesting to you dear readers, and I’m excited about our selection!  We started with quite the lengthy list of titles and authors we wanted to share with you and narrowed it down quickly.  My favorite piece of this month’s list is that without really trying, we have a list of titles that include BIPOC authors and characters.  We’ve shared that one of our goals is to be sure we aren’t just reading books by white women (although for women’s history month, we are sticking with female authors), and this month felt like a month to be sure we included stories with the intersectionality BIPOC women experience, and we are just delighted it happened naturally. [Ashley Interjects: Go Team!] In addition to our book review titles, we’re also planning to bring you posts on books for kids focusing on women’s history and / or feminism, nonfiction for or about women, and even some poetry about being your own hero.  

An Extraordinary Union (The Loyal League #1) by Alyssa Cole 

Rules for Being a Girl by Candace Bushnell and Katie Cotugno

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal

Dominicana by Angie Cruz

All this Could be Yours by Jami Attenberg

I’m pretty excited, and not just because I’m getting to clear five titles off my holds list this month, plus two I own and haven’t read!  I’m looking forward to seeing what I can learn from these titles, and would also love to know what titles you thought of when you read that we were reading about women this month.  Please let me know in the comments!

~Nikki 

If you remember from last year, our loose theme was March Madness, and we had chosen that theme the February before because we didn’t have a theme for the titles we wanted to post about that month. We were trying to read off our holds list and were anticipating a stack of new release titles. In our intro post of the month, we were disappointed in the cancellation of Sarah J. Maas’ book tour for House of Earth and Blood. Two weeks later and we were thrown deep into the madness theme because that’s literally what our lives had become. Which brings us here, maddening month after maddening month, of not being able to go out and ‘people’ like we were used to, and in general live life as the grown AF adults we are.

Tricky thing about that post from a year ago, Don’t Overthink It: Make Easier Decisions, Stop Second-Guessing, and Bring More Joy To Your Life by Anne Bogel was one of those new release titles we were anticipating reading that month…it’s our Virtual Book Club pick  for this month and we still haven’t read it, and we’re not ashamed or sorry about it. I have 15 books on the TBR to complete reading this month (two are already in progress) and I’m a little nervous, but, I’m also not going to overthink it. If it happens I’ll be so proud of myself for rocking my goals. If not, whatever I do complete, I’ll know the plan that was created helped me get even as far as I could. 

And that’s part of what makes focusing on Women’s History this month really, truly important. The plans that were created in the past by our female ancestors to make this world a better place for us now, and for future generations, are those that need constant reassessment to continue making progress towards the equality of the genders. So, Hearts.Wants.Books. is committed to celebrating the HERstories of our past, present, and our plans for the future. 

~Ashley

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