My dirty secret is I'm terrible at assigned reading. Like, I don't like it. I like to read what I like to read in whatever order I like to read it. Adding deadlines to a thing I do for otherwise generally selfish reasons is a sure way to dampen the flames of my enthusiasm. And yet I know it's good to connect with folks over items of shared interest, and it's a lot easier for me to do that when a book is fresh in my mind. But how to do so in a way that doesn't make me feel kind of itchy about it?

To that end I'm going to try something. I'm starting a book club. But it's not really a book club. Maybe it's more like a reading society? An alignment of readers. A tome-aniac fellowship? I'm not sure what to call it. Maybe we just don't call it anything. Or maybe we absolutely call it something even more stupid than "The TDAOC Tome-aniac Fellowship" and we make secret lapel pins for it. I don't know.

My thought is this: I want to blog a little more about what I'm reading again, because if it's going to be the end of the world at least I can go down blogging, and it would be nice to share the ride with some other folks. To that end, here and there, with no real schedule or rationale, I'm going to shout out a book I'm about to read before I read it. And then a bit after I read it I'm going to post something about it. It'll be low-key, nothing super formal, certainly more bloggy, but it'll be something. It won't be nothing.

And so in doing this if it seems like I mention a book you might be interested in reading, like a book you might want to talk about, or at least read me talking about it, or even read while ignoring whatever I say about it, you can read the book around the same time I read it, totally on your own time and schedule, and then you can engage with me on it as much or as little as you like, when you like. If you want to talk back to me about it, either by e-mail or blog post or social media or whatever, that's cool. If you want to silently judge me, that's cool too. It's all good.

There's lots of stuff like this out there, plenty of cool group read projects and the like if you look around for them, so I know I'm not up to anything innovative here, but if I can occasionally add another option onto the pile, I figure that's one good thing I can toss out into a universe that can use a few more good things in it.

The First Pick

To that end, hey, here's my first not-really-a-book-club pick: Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America, by Talia Lavin. It's brand new, just came out last month, so I don't know much of what buzz there is around it; it across my line of sight out there on the socials last week, around the same time I was starting to think both about reading more things about things like this and reading more things like this in public. I've got a copy from the library, it's about 260 pages once you lop off the end matter, and I think it's going to make for an interesting read.

My current plan is to finish up The Power Broker this week (I'm down to the last 60 pages!) and then I think I'm going to jump into Wild Faith right after that. So, figure I'll read that next week, and get something up here hopefully before Thanksgiving. Which is really cool timing on my part I am sure. If nothing else I guess it gives you something really cool and chill to talk to your family about over cranberry sauce and stuffing.