Hi all!

I think we would benefit from some discussion leaders with next month's books. Could we get some volunteers for the part? I think I could manage for A Room of One's Own, which I have discussed in a classroom setting, and The Complete Persepolis. I might be able to do Handmaid's Tale, but it's a favourite of so many people that I feel someone else would be able to do a more personal, vibrant job of leading that discussion. And I haven't read The Girl with All the Gifts, so I would only be able to start out with a very, very generic format.

What does leading entail? Nothing too complicated. Come up with a few "Focus questions," find some articles relating to the work which provide good discourse or useful background information, and so on and so forth. Some ideas:

• The Handmaid's Tale takes the form of preserved "journals" that the reader, a historian of this hypothetical future gains access to. There are probably some more specific questions about this one could ask or direct the reader towards, but I don't remember the book precisely enough to think of specifics. Hence why it would be better if someone else could lead and develop on idea fragments like this.

• In "Shakespeare's Sister" from A Room of One's Own, Woolf employs an interesting rhetorical technique that cuts down the illusions in the claim that "A woman could never have been Shakespeare." What was this technique, and what disparity did it highlight between the patriarchal claim and Woolf's own? How effective did you find it to be?

• Marjane Satrapi spent a fair amount of time being homeless in a literal sense, but the concept of homelessness is not isolated to that period of her life. What are some factors that kept both Iran and Europe from being her home? How did some of these amplify the effects of gender discrimination towards her?

I should add that anyone who wants to start a discussion topic should feel free to. The more the merrier! And I think a continuous influx of new submissions - articles, your own individual thoughts, parallels to your own life, etc etc - can do a great deal more to get this sub off the ground.

I unfortunately did not manage to read any of the books this past month, but if anyone wants to start discussions for those as well, I would be quite grateful.