The Northstack Book Club in 2018
Happy New Year everyone!
After doing a great retro for the book club at the end of 2017 we’ve decided on the following changes for 2018:
Content
We felt that the book club could be improved by stronger curation and the possibility of going deeper into fewer topics. We therefore decided to pick four themes for 2018. We’ll still read one book a month but for three consecutive months the books will have a common theme.
The schedule for 2018:
The Science and Tools of Food curated by Jóhann Þorvaldur Bergþórsson
- January: Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson
- February: On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee — we’ll only read Chapters 5–9 but feel free to read it all!
- March: The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way We Feed Cities by Peter Ladner
EQ curated by Kristinn Árni Lár Hróbjartsson
- April: TBA
- May: TBA
- June: TBA
Psychology — Consumer Behaviour/Habits curated by Hannes Agnarsson Johnson
- July: TBA
- August: TBA
- September: TBA
Digital design curated by Ari Tómasson
- October: TBA
- November: TBA
- December: TBA
Format
We generally liked the format of the session. A silent brainstorm (Highlights, Lowlights, Themes, How can I apply the learnings?), followed by a group discussion is simple, doesn’t need preparation and has sparked great discussions.
There was however some slight confusion about the difference between Highlights and Themes. We’re therefore renaming Themes to Learnings to have the categories be transparent.
We also felt that it would be nice to leave a permanent records of the meet-up. For each future book club we will write up a short summary of the notes and post a photo of the post-its to this Medium publication.
We also wanted to better involve experts on the books that we are reading. When possible we are going to reach out to the authors and invite them to join by hangout.
Attendance
An attendance of 6–10 people has worked well. We however felt that the discussions could be interesting to more people so we’re going to try to live-stream future events. A recording of the live-stream will also be included in the blog post.
Please let us know how these changes sound to you. We look forward to a great year of reading with you all!
