I did not start a book club because I wanted to read more books.
In fact, I became increasingly convinced that reading more is not necessarily the answer to living in an information-rich world.
Today, information is abundant. News is immediate. Research is searchable. AI can summarise almost anything. If I want to know what happened, I can usually find out within seconds.
The harder question is: What is actually worth knowing?
And after that: How do I build a better understanding of the world from what I know?
That is what this book club is really about.
From consuming information to building understanding
I have been thinking about the idea of an “information space”: the environment of institutions, media, books, communities and technologies through which we understand the world.
Every information source has a purpose.
A newspaper has an editorial model. A research institution has a mandate. A company has commercial incentives. A government agency has policy objectives. A social-media platform optimises for a particular form of engagement.
This does not make any of them inherently good or bad.
But it means that information never arrives completely detached from the system that produced it.
So simply consuming more information does not necessarily produce better judgment.
Sometimes it produces the opposite: more inputs, more context switching, more opinions and less ability to distinguish what actually matters.
The book club is an attempt to solve a smaller version of that problem.
Instead of asking, “What should I read today?”, I want to ask:
What do I need to understand?
Then:
What book might help me understand it?
And finally:
Who else might be thinking about the same question?
Books as infrastructure
A good book does something that a news article usually cannot.
It gives you enough context to see relationships between things.
One idea leads to another. A historical event explains an institutional arrangement. An economic incentive explains a behaviour. A technological change alters the structure of a market.
Eventually, individual facts begin to form a model.
This is why I am increasingly interested in reading not as knowledge accumulation, but as model building.
The objective is not to remember more facts.
It is to become better at seeing systems.
If I understand the system, I can start asking better questions:
- Where are the important variables?
- What drives them?
- What assumptions are being made?
- Where are the dependencies?
- What could change?
- What should I watch?
And, perhaps most importantly:
What can I do differently because I understand this?
Why discuss the books with other people?
Reading alone has an obvious limitation: I can only see the world from inside my own model.
A discussion introduces another model.
Someone notices an assumption I missed. Someone interprets the same chapter through a completely different experience. Someone disagrees with the author’s argument. Someone connects the book to something happening in another industry, country or community.
The value of the discussion is therefore not simply that we “share opinions”.
It is that we expose our mental models to other mental models.
That makes the book club a kind of informal laboratory for thinking.
The network matters
Over time, I also became interested in something else: the relationships between books.
A book rarely stands alone.
A book about economics may lead to a book about institutions. That may lead to political science. Political science may lead to history. History may explain why a particular institution exists. Another book may challenge the assumptions behind the first one.
The interesting object is therefore not the bookshelf.
It is the network between the books.
This is one reason I have spent so much time thinking about knowledge graphs, connections and the structure of information.
The goal is not to create a larger database.
It is to make the relationships between ideas more visible.
A book club as a self-filtering mechanism
There is also a social dimension to this.
I have come to like the idea that:
Every activity is a self-filtering mechanism.
If you want to meet people who are interested in a particular kind of question, you can create an activity around that question.
The people who are attracted to it are already telling you something about themselves.
That makes a book club different from simply creating another online community.
The book is partly an excuse.
The real purpose is to create a place where people who are curious about the same questions can find one another.
Over time, those relationships may become more valuable than the individual books.
What I want this to become
I don’t want this to become a reading competition.
I don’t particularly care whether we finish ten books a month.
I care more about whether one book changes the way we see something.
Whether a conversation changes a belief.
Whether a connection between two ideas reveals something previously invisible.
Whether a discussion leads to another question.
And eventually, whether those accumulated questions help us make better decisions in our actual lives.
So perhaps the simplest description of the project is:
Read less randomly. Think more deeply. Connect ideas. Find people who are asking similar questions.
The book is the starting point.
The real project is understanding the world — and finding better people with whom to understand it.
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