Our first task is to choose a book! My top choice would be The Overstory by Richard Powers. But it is long and the waiting list for the ebook is also long. There are a few hard copies that we could pass around and Ray and I have an audiobook version we could share. Even so, it's a long (but wonderful) read. Maybe set it up for May?
Meanwhile, here's a list of good candidates that Linda found when she first introduced the idea of a book group. Most are available as ebooks. Maybe for mid-April.
Rob suggested we consider Sophie's Planet (not Sophie's Choice) by James Hansen and his granddaughter, Sophie. Hansen has made drafts of the first 4 chapters available. I suggest we wait until the book is published to consider it.
Great! Happy reading!
Sounds like a good plan, Sue! Thanks for keeping this club idea going!
The book is LONG!!! I suggest our first discussion not be of the whole book, but after one of the sections, such as after ROOTS or TRUNK. I know when I first read the Root section, I wondered why people were raving about the book and whether I should bother with further reading. A discussion after that point could keep people going.
I'm in, but not on Monday please. I teach until 11:45 and then need a break.
I'd love to read The Overstory.
Just an idea, what about over the lunch hour? Kind of like sharing a meal. Might be tough for working people though. Also, I would prefer to not schedule on weeks that we have our other CCL meetings.
Well, since several of us are reading a The Overstory, make it so! 😆
A separate forum per book would be fine. We’d just start a new topic under Book Forum. And yes, John, using the forum to discuss would be the idea. It would help so we don’t have to spend our time sending emails back and forth. Just need a book to get started. Linda??? I think you’re IT.
Or, maybe have separate forums for different books.
Hi! I'm just getting caught up with this. Yes I think I was the original suggester. Makes me feel like I am akin to a whistleblower that may need protection. :-) Anyway, I have started The Overstory on my new Kindle. Since I now have a Kindle, I can get just about anything. MY second recommendation would be The Future We Choose by one of the Paris Agreement negotiators. I understand issues about getting copies, so maybe we should start with the easiest for everyone to get.
I'm thinking that we need a "decision maker." Who made the original suggestion that we do a book club? Maybe that person would be willing to make calls. We've had several good suggestions including this one. Original suggester: can you help out by offering a decision? And then spell out the logistics of how we are going to meet?
Has there been a decisions? If not what about the Drawdown Review? It's about 100 pages and it's for 2020. The link below downloads it or go to Project Drawdown. We could do a chapter every two weeks? There's an 11 week wait on Overstory with the Tacoma public library. https://drawdown.org/downloads?tca=7kcJDw6Pw--JZ852ds8YOWVhgaaH0QXFCqN9xd63VCc
New Book, just published. The Citizen's Guide to Climate Success, Mark Jaccard. John, one of your favorite climate scientists, Katharine Hayhoe, gives it a solid thumbs up.
We can set this up anyway we wish. A separate forum per book is a possibility. The forum can get us going on a book and Zoom can take over. Or whatever.
I agree with John that someone needs to pick a book now. Then someone else can pick the next book, and so on. Since it was your common sense idea, John, I vote for you to pick a book. That's my 2 cents. :-)
What is our time frame for each book? Are we going to do a book club discussion via zoom or on this forum? If it is on this forum, will there be a separate thread for each book? I will keep my eyes open for Overstory to be available, but also happy to start a different book if that is the consensus.
We'd be happy to read either of those - I have experienced book clubs in the past where the book choice was made by individuals in a rotating format so that everyone got to pick a book over time and then the cycle started all over. If we try to pick a book by consensus we might never pick one. To me it's more important to have the friendship connection than to have the "right" book. And if someone picks a book that I wouldn't have read, maybe that's good for me. Broaden my horizons. Have an object lesson that not everyone sees the world in the same way I do (is that possible?? 🙄)
Dianne and I have started listening to Overstory on audio - we'll continue that pursuit and then pick up on whatever the group chooses if it's something different. I don't have a strong opinion from the list provided by the Yale Climate Connections group - but the play collection Where Is the Hope? An Anthology of Short Climate Change Plays, appealed to me as being more on the "creative" side (I sometimes get worn out by all the "facts" and the controversies, etc.) - I see it's not available right now anyway.
We could also pick an article on climate change and the pandemic and get started using this forum right away