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Meeting #9 October 19 | How To Do Nothing

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Written by: Jenny Odell Meeting date: Sunday October 19, 2025, 9:00-11:00am PT / 12:00-2:00 pm ET / 1:00-3:00 pm AT / 6:00-8:00pm CET In a world where addictive technology is designed to buy and sell our attention, and our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity, it can seem impossible to escape. But in this inspiring field guide to dropping out of the attention economy, artist and critic Jenny Odell shows us how we can still win back our lives. Odell sees our attention as the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. And we must actively and continuously choose how we use it. We might not spend it on things that capitalism has deemed important … but once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress. Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, ...
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Meeting #8 August 24 | The Midnight Library

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Written by: Matt Haig Meeting date: Sunday August 24, 2025, 9:00-11:00am PT / 12:00-2:00 pm ET / 1:00-3:00 pm AT / 6:00-8:00pm CET Between life and death there is a library. When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Up until now, her life has been full of misery and regret. She feels she has let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change. The books in the Midnight Library enable Nora to live as if she had done things differently. With the help of an old friend, she can now undo every one of her regrets as she tries to work out her perfect life. But things aren't always what she imagined they'd be, and soon her choices place the library and herself in extreme danger. Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: what is the best way to live?
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Meeting #7 January 12 | How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

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Written by: Regan Penaluna Meeting date: Sunday January 12, 2025, 9:00-11:00am PT / 12:00-2:00 pm ET / 1:00-3:00 pm AT / 6:00-8:00pm CET Book description:  From a bold new voice in nonfiction, an exhilarating account of the lives and works of influential 17th and 18th century feminist philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and her predecessors who have been written out of history, and a searing look at the author’s experience of patriarchy and sexism in academia. As a young woman growing up in small-town Iowa, Regan Penaluna daydreamed about the big questions: Who are we and what is this strange world we find ourselves in? In college she fell in love with philosophy and chose to pursue it as an academician, the first step, she believed, to becoming a self-determined person living a life of the mind. What Penaluna didn’t realize was that the Western philosophical canon taught in American universities, as well as the culture surrounding it, would slowly grind her down through its misogyny,...
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Meeting #6 August 11 | The Dispossessed

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Written by: Ursula K. Le Guin Meeting date: Sunday August 11, 2024, 9:00-11:00am PT / 12:00-2:00 pm ET / 1:00-3:00 pm AT / 6:00-8:00pm CET Book description: One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels “One of the greats. . . . Not just a science fiction writer; a literary icon.” —Stephen King “Engrossing . . . Ursula Le Guin is more than just a writer of adult fantasy and science fiction . . . she is a philosopher; an explorer in the landscapes of the mind.” — Cincinnati Enquirer Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award–winning classic, a profound and thoughtful tale of anarchism and capitalism, individualism and collectivism, and one ambitious man’s quest to bridge the ideological chasm separating two worlds. The Dispossessed is the spellbinding story of anarchist Shevek, the “galactically famous scientist,” who single-handedly attempts to reunite two planets cut off from each other by centuries of distrust. Anarres, Shevek’s homeland, is a bleak moon settled by an anarchic u...
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Meeting #5 June 9 | The Top Five Regrets of the Dying

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Written by:  Bronnie Ware Meeting date:  Sunday June 9, 2024, 9:00-11:00am PT / 12:00-2:00 pm ET / 1:00-3:00 pm AT / 6:00-8:00pm CET Book description:  After too many years of unfulfilling work, Bronnie Ware began searching for a job with heart. Despite having no formal qualifications or experience, she found herself working in palliative care. Over the years she spent tending to the needs of those who were dying, Bronnie's life was transformed. Later, she wrote a blog about the most common regrets expressed to her by the people she had cared for. The article, also called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, gained so much momentum that it was read by more than three million people around the globe in its first year. At the requests of many, Bronnie now shares her own personal story. Bronnie has had a colourful and diverse past, but by applying the lessons of those nearing their death to her own life, she developed an understanding that it is possible for people, if they ma...
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Meeting #4 April 7 | Upright Women Wanted

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Written by: Sarah Gailey Meeting date: Sunday April 7, 2024, 9:00-11:00am PT / 12:00-2:00 pm ET / 1:00-3:00 pm AT / 6:00-8:00pm CET Book description: In Upright Women Wanted, award-winning author Sarah Gailey reinvents the pulp Western with an explicitly antifascist, near-future story of queer identity. The future American Southwest is full of bandits, fascists, and queer librarian spies on horseback trying to do the right thing. "A good old-fashioned horse opera for the 22nd century. Gunslinger librarians of the apocalypse are on a mission to spread public health, decency, and the revolution."—Charles Stross "A dazzling neo-western adventure. . . . Gailey’s gorgeous writing and authentic characters make this slim volume a pure delight."—Publishers Weekly, starred review
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Meeting #3 February 4 | Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

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Written by:  Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua Meeting date:  Sunday February 4, 2024 from 2:00-4:00 pm ET / 3:00-5:00 pm AT Book description:  An energizing case for hope about the climate, from Rebecca Solnit (“the voice of the resistance”—New York Times), climate activist Thelma Young Lutunatabua, and a chorus of voices calling on us to rise to the moment. Not Too Late brings strong climate voices from around the world to address the political, scientific, social, and emotional dimensions of the most urgent issue human beings have ever faced. Accessible, encouraging, and engaging, it's an invitation to everyone to understand the issue more deeply, participate more boldly, and imagine the future more creatively. In concise, illuminating essays and interviews, Not Too Late features the voices of Indigenous activists, such as Guam-based attorney and writer Julian Aguon; climate scientists, among them Jacquelyn Gill and Edward Carr; artists, such as Marshall Isla...
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Meeting #2 December 3 | The Overstory

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Written by: Richard Powers Meeting date: Sunday December 3, 2023 from 2:00-4:00 pm ET / 3:00-5:00 pm AT Book description: The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of -- and paean to -- the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers' twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours -- vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
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Meeting #1 September 24 | Rest as Resistance: A Manifesto

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Written by: Tricia Hersey Meeting date: Sunday September 24, 2023 from 2:00-4:00 pm EST / 3:00-5:00 pm AST Book description: Disrupt and push back against capitalism and white supremacy. In this book, Tricia Hersey, aka The Nap Bishop, encourages us to connect to the liberating power of rest, daydreaming, and naps as a foundation for healing and justice. What would it be like to live in a well-rested world? Far too many of us have claimed productivity as the cornerstone of success. Brainwashed by capitalism, we subject our bodies and minds to work at an unrealistic, damaging, and machine‑level pace –– feeding into the same engine that enslaved millions into brutal labor for its own relentless benefit. In Rest Is Resistance, Tricia Hersey, aka the Nap Bishop, casts an illuminating light on our troubled relationship with rest and how to imagine and dream our way to a future where rest is exalted. Our worth does not reside in how much we produce, especially not for a system that exploit...
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