92 Book Club Videos!
And an invitation to join us!
I finished uploading the videos I’ve been recording since December 2021 of our “Obsidian” Book Club meetings on Zoom. Over the last two and a half years, we have read together and discussed nineteen books, spending over 10,000 minutes together on Saturday mornings. I failed to record a couple or the recordings were corrupted, but I’ve uploaded about 9,600 minutes (or 160 hours) of video. I’ve got to say, I’m a bit impressed!
These are all currently available for everybody to view for free and comment on. Substack creates transcripts, so you could read along or grab chunks of text for your own notes. We sort-of ping-ponged back and forth between topics of interest (often historical or of current cultural significance) and reading/note-making or knowledge management titles. Some people may be more interested in some than in others, so here’s a list with links to the first meeting in each series:
The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow
How to Take Smart Notes, Sönke Ahrens
Too Much to Know, Ann M. Blair and The Extended Mind, Annie Murphy Paul
A Brief History of Equality, Thomas Piketty
How to Make Notes and Write, Dan Allosso
Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty, Rank, Eppard, Bullock
Antinet Zettelkasten, Scott Scheper
Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, David Graeber
Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past, Kruse and Zelizer, eds.
Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist, Kate Raworth
Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge from Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic, Simon Winchester
The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, Oreskes and Conway
How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren
The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial, David Lipsky
Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber
The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, Cory Doctorow
Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age, Alex Wright and Index: A History of the Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age, Dennis Duncan
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg
The next book we’ll be discussing is The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism by Clara E. Mattei. We’ll begin discussing the first four chapters Saturday morning (May 4, 2024). I’ll continue making videos and posting them to the Book Club Section. However, if you would like to read along with us and discuss, you are welcome. Drop me a line and I’ll get you set up.