5 Things I Learned From the Anti-Book Club

Last year I launched the Anti-Book Club, my own take on the tradition of book clubs.

The idea is simple: instead of everyone in the group reading the same book, duplicating time and effort, we each read a different book on the same topic. Then each person summarizes the book they read, and I compile and share the summaries with everyone who contributed.

The goal is to divide the effort of reading a large collection of works, and thus to conquer a complex topic in a small fraction of the time it would take one person to read all of them. Along the way, we produce a valuable collection of succinct book summaries that we can easily refer to in the future.

This experiment relied on a few key tools: