Welcome to our newly launched EQUIP book club site. After many months of planning, I'm so excited that we're about to start! I'm excited because I love reading, and I love having conversations about the books I read with friends. Now I'll be able to have conversations (of the electronic kind) with many, many more women.

For this first post, I wanted to explain a bit more about how the book club will work. The EQUIP committee have chosen 11 different books that we hope will interest you - they are all books that at least some of us have read and loved and want to share! We've tried to choose a wide range as well - we have a classic ( The Pilgrim's Progress), a modern secular novel ( The Sunday Philosophy Club), books that relate to the Christian life ( Don't Waste your Life), books that are particularly relevant to women ( Feminine Appeal and Did I Kiss Marriage Goodbye?), biography ( Faithful Women and their Extraordinary God) and many more. As well as choosing them for their diversity, we tried to choose books that would generate good discussions (we won't always agree with everything in the books - and that's okay, except when we read Luke's gospel!!).

While all the books are worth reading, you don't have to read all 11 books to be involved. You can choose the ones that interest you and read along and skip the other ones, or save them for later if you're struggling to read a book a month (I admit it is a big ask for many of us!). Either way, we hope you could use the book club as a motivation to read more (more on that in a later post).

As well as reading along, we'd love it if you commented on the reflections and questions we contribute. We're hoping that our thoughts will work as 'conversation starters', so please join in. It will make it so much more interesting if you get involved and share your thoughts.

The contributors are going to write at least 4 reflections on their book for the month. I'm hoping to post one of these each Monday. As well as checking in on Monday, it will be worth checking in every couple of days for other things that I'll include which relate to the book - eg. interviews, links to articles, poetry, reading lists, book reviews.

You can find our comment policy on the sidebar to the right. I'll be back next week with a post explaining how to comment (it can be more tricky than it sounds sometimes - believe me).

Once again, I'm looking forward to reading along with you, and hearing your thoughts.