Hello everyone! Happy October from all of us here at Feminist Book Club. It is the season of all things Halloween, Samhain, All Hallow's Eve, and of course, the Season of the Witch, which just so happens to be our theme for the month! Without further ado, the October Book of the Month is...

VenCo by Cherie Dimaline!

Lucky St. James, a Métis millennial living with her cantankerous but loving grandmother Stella, is barely hanging on when she discovers she will be evicted from their tiny Toronto apartment. Then, one night, something strange and irresistible calls out to Lucky. Burrowing through a wall, she finds a silver spoon etched with a crooked-nosed witch and the word SALEM, humming with otherworldly energy.

Hundreds of miles away in Salem, Myrna Good has been looking for Lucky. Myrna works for VenCo, a front company fueled by vast resources of dark money.

Lucky is familiar with the magic of her indigenous ancestors, but she has no idea that the spoon links her to VenCo’s network of witches throughout North America. Generations of witches have been waiting for centuries for the seven spoons to come together, igniting a new era, and restoring women to their rightful power.

But as reckoning approaches, a very powerful adversary is stalking their every move. He’s Jay Christos, a roguish and deadly witch-hunter as old as witchcraft itself.

To find the last spoon, Lucky and Stella embark on a rollicking and dangerous road trip to the darkly magical city of New Orleans, where the final showdown will determine whether VenCo will usher in a new beginning…or remain underground forever.

We highly recommend borrowing a copy of VenCo from your library, but if you would prefer to own a copy, you can buy one here from Bookshop.org or an audiobook copy from Libro.fm, both of which you can set up to support Feminist Book Club! We look forward to reading with you and will announce our discussion times shortly!

October is here, and that means it is (almost) time for the 2026 Ghoulishly Bookish Readathon!

For those of you who are new here, Ghoulishly Bookish is our fall readathon, taking place from October 17th through October 31st! It’s a team-based productivity readathon–instead of trying to read a certain number of books, or books that fit a certain prompt, you hear points (candy) per 100 pages read, and the team that collects the most candy by midnight on Halloween wins! 

The hope of this challenge is that it’ll be fun, community-building, and low-stakes. If you usually can’t participate in readathons because you’re a slower reader who doesn’t finish more than a book or two a month, you only have to read 8 pages per day to earn a candy to help your team. If you’re too much of a mood reader for prompt-based reading challenges, you can read anything you want for this one–including graphic novels or comics.

For my audiobook readers, those will obviously count as well, just convert your listening into pages. If you use Storygraph, it does it automatically (just look at your journal), but you can also engage in some light math–say you read 20% of a 500 page novel… that’s 100 pages! Or you can wait to log your pages until you finish a book (page counts are easily available on Storygraph, Goodreads, or Amazon).

The readathon itself will take place on Discord–you can access our community server by subscribing to any tier and clicking the widget at the bottom of this post (or in your welcome email!) or clicking here.

Choose Your Fighter

The Ghoulishly Bookish Readathon consists of two teams:

Team Vampire

Team Witch

You can head over to #choose-your-team in the Discord server to pick which team you want to be a part of! You can select whichever team you prefer, and I will weight the candy earned to make it fair, but it is easier on me when you keep the teams even–and I think it makes it more fun when it’s closer to a 1-to-1 ratio on each team. 

Earning + Logging Candy

As I said before, you earn one candy for every 100 pages read! When you’ve read 100 pages (or whenever you’re ready to log your multiple hundreds of pages at once) pop over to #candy-log and comment your team’s candy into the channel equal to the 100s of pages you’ve read since you last logged candy.

Team Vampire’s candy is

Team Witch's candy is

You can log as you go, at the end of each day, not until the very end of the readathon–it’s up to you! I’ll be doing updated throughout the readathon of where the counts are at, but as long as your candy is logged by noon, pacific time on November 1st (though the pages must have been read on Oct 31st or before) it will be counted for the final score! 

I had so much fun with this readathon last year and I’m ecstatic to bring it back! I hope you’ll join us! :)

Hi loves! I’ve got quite the spooky lineup for you this month and I can’t wait to unleash them!

As always, bookworms and weirdos will get the videos ad free and with extended cuts AND 24-48 hours early so if that sounds like something you’d enjoy, now is a great time to upgrade!

Let me know which one tire most excited about in the poll!