@hpy and I enjoyed seeing some of you at last year’s book club meetings, and we would like to bring them back again for 2023! We’ve been hosting these informal get-togethers every 2-3 months and are looking to host the next one sometime in late March. If you are interested in joining, fill out this poll by January 16th to find a time to meet!
Reading List
You can access the reading list here - feel free to add your contributions to it!
You can fill out the following poll, based on our reading list , to share which books you would like to read in the future:
The Alchemist
Makers (Cory Doctorow)
The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity from Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters, and other Informal Entrepreneurs (Alexa Clay & Kyra Maya Phillips)
Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (1979, Bruno Latour)
Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy 1 by Nathan Schneider
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman
Sapiens: A brief history of humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
oh dear, same here, i’m really interested in this even though i’m not sure i’ll have the time to read, would it be ok to participate in the discussion if we skim through (unless it’s Latour or a couple of other ones I’ve already read in an other life!)
Thank you for following up on this! I will admit, things got a little busy for @hpy and I these past few weeks and we didn’t have the time to host a meeting in March. However, we could try to find a new time to meet in mid-June!
To those interested in joining, please fill out this poll by the end of this week and we can find a time that works
Thanks for this, I’ve filled in the form, however I’m wondering if either a mistake has been made or all of you are based in Oceania, as my 5pm-11pm (the app asks me to input my timezone, so I assume the schedule is in my timezone) is bracketed off and I can’t select it. I’ve selected 11pm-midnight just because I want to get this off the ground, as it’s possible that I may have a job by June. It’d be really great if the 5pm-11pm (i assume it’s in my timezone, which is UTC+3) were open for selection, but I guess there must be a reason that it isn’t.
Hi @haris. I think it’s because @briannaljohns is the one who created the poll, and what you see already accounts for their availability, i.e. @briannaljohns is not available 17:00-23:00 UTC+3.
Apologies for the confusing poll, scheduling meetings from my timezone (UTC +10) can be quite a headache sometimes!
Based on the results of the meeting poll, I went ahead and added a book club meeting for 8 pm UTC on June 14 to the GOSH calendar. We will discuss The End of Everything by Katie Mack - but feel free to join even if you don’t have time to read it all!
I was just wondering, any chance of a freely available online copy of the book? Or otherwise there’s a couple of youtube links that I’ve seen that i could follow (though I think in order to be properly prepared for the level of our discussion i’d probably have to read the whole book).
Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a freely available copy online. I understand this can be limiting to participation, so I am more than happy to discuss any other books you’ve been reading lately, or even some recent articles that have been of interest!
It’s quite likely that I may finish the book (though not 100%). I’ve started it and at the moment i’ve read up to chapter 2. I quite enjoy the style, looks like she had fun writing it, even though i have my own non-standard views about cosmology and esoterica like dark matter - do you think it’d serve our little group if i write posts here with impressions as I go along? I could limit them to one per chapter, and then a short one at that, too. It would help me scaffold my thought and remember things by the end, and it may provide discussion points as well.
You are more than welcome to share your impressions! It’s actually been a while since I’ve read the book so this would definitely help refresh my memory
I’d suggest adding your thoughts to this pad, it would be easier to follow there while we use this thread to discuss things like scheduling, meeting links, etc.
thanks for that, will do! (though i’m more aiming for things that may stimulate me, in the sense of more ‘talking points’ which may not necessarily be helpful to you, but I think it’ll be fine, I’m pretty sure the three of us can have a lot of fun and keep it up for an hour or an hour and a half!! )
Hi @haris, @hpy and anyone else interested in joining our book club meeting this week!
@hpy and I have been experimenting with a Big Blue Button instance that is being hosted by Community Bridge and we’d like to try it out as our meeting link for this week’s book club meeting!
The link to join is here, and the access code is GOSH2023. As for the “Name” field - just put your own name here.
If this doesn’t work, we will use our usual Jitsi link as a backup.
We had a great book club meeting this week, thanks to @haris and @hpy for joining and providing some thought-provoking conversations!
We decided in the meeting that the next book we would like to read is Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, as some of us already have this book in our libraries! You can buy the DRM-free e-book here.
We’d like to meet again at the end of August, help us find a time to meet by completing this meeting poll!
