In 2017, I started a book club with friends from college. To date, we’ve read 54 books, and every pick has been an alternating, unilateral selection. No previews, no votes. The selector just emails the group with “here’s what we’re reading next.”
We came to this process because we missed how we read in college. The University of Chicago has a rigid core curriculum that forces all undergrads to read and interpret great works like Weber, Marx, Aristotle, and Foucault. While we haven’t reread many of them (and may never), we missed the camaraderie that came from reading and debating hard ideas. So we decided to recreate that with a book club and a unilateral selection process. Here’s why it works:
It introduces randomness. The non-selectors are forced to read something they might never have heard of or had any inclination to read. This grows you as a reader. It also creates sharper disagreement, and so more interesting discussion.
It creates accountability. The selector knows their pick will be forced on everyone else and that a bad one will be judged accordingly, so they propose thoughtfully.
When I tell people outside the club how we pick books, the most common response is some version of “I’d feel bad if people didn’t like the book I picked.” That is absolutely true — I got torched for Hopscotch and Under the Volcano. But the benefits are that the non-selectors feel less pressure to both like the book and finish it because they played no part in picking it. In book clubs where the group decides together, everyone is complicit in the selection.