Partitioned Book Club

Partitioned Book Club (working title) is a specific kind of one-off meetup where attendees coordinate to read different chapters of the same book before the meetup. The meetup consists of each read chapter getting briefly summarized by its reader(s), and then a more general discussion of the book. In a traditional book club you read a chapter a week. In a partitioned book club, instead of there being multiple weeks you have multiple guys. You get it.

It only works with a very specific kind of book—namely, non-fiction books where most chapters are relatively self-contained, and you don’t lose critical info by not reading a specific chapter.

It also only works with a meetup of a specific size—like, between 6-15 people.

If you have both of those things though, this meetup can be really fun and a great way to “read” a book in a week.

It does work better if the organizer has read the book in its entirety, but this is not necessary.

Obviously, you will get more out of a book if you read the entire thing by yourself. But we’re doing the ⁸⁰⁄₂₀ thing here.

How to Run An Event

At least one week before the meetup^[1], post an announcement post describing the book that you are reading. Give a quick summary of what the book’s about, and let everyone know that they’ll be reading the introduction^[2], and one other chapter.

In the body of the event description, link a google sheet form set to “anyone can edit”, with two columns, “Book Chapters” and “Name”. Tell people to put their names down besides the book chapter that they want to read and briefly summarize for the group. The intent is for people to not double up on book chapters if there are still blank spots next to some other chapters, and be able to see in real time which chapters are claimed.

The first column should be populated by the organizer, and will be a straightforward list of the book chapters that are relatively self contained, from the book. The second column will be left blank, for your attendees to call dibs on chapters they feel interested in. It’s completely ok for some chapters to remain blank and to be not discussed at the meetup.

I like providing PDFs of the book in the group’s private spaces (such as a private discord), whenever possible, but this is not necessary.

When it comes to running the actual meetup, I generally split it into two halves. The first half, the chapters get briefly summarized. I’ve found that it’s pretty important to keep a strict timer on, so your more long-winded members don’t end up taking up a disproportionate amount of time for their chapters. I think 5 minutes per chapter is probably good, for most pop science books.

In the second half, move on to more general discussion. I sometimes prepare discussion questions (LLMs are a great help for this if you prompt them the right way) but be okay with them not being used if the conversation just flows naturally.

Books I’ve Run Events On

Feel free to yoink text wholesale from my events if it’s helpful.

Legal Systems Very Different From Ours

Event Link (includes description, supplementary readings, discussion questions)

Everyone reads
Introduction

Chapters for partitioned reading:

1. Imperial Chinese Law
2. Romani Law
3. The Amish
4. Jewish Law
5. Islamic Law
7. Pirate Law
8. Prisoners’ Law
10. Saga-Period Iceland
11. Somali Law
12. Early Irish Law
13. Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne: The Plains Indians
15. England in the Eighteenth Century
16. Athenian Law: The Work of a Mad Economist

The Elephant in the Brain

Event Link (includes description. No discussion questions included because I anticipated correctly that people will have plenty to discuss.)

Everyone reads
https://www.elephantinthebrain.com/outline.html up to Part II

Chapters for partitioned reading:

7: Body Language
8: Laughter
9: Conversation
10: Consumption
11: Art
12: Charity
13: Education
14: Medicine
15: Religion
16: Politics

Examples of Other Viable Books/Readings

There’s a chance that some books here don’t work. The organizer should skim the book to figure out which specific chapters can be partitioned out usefully—it’s sometimes the case that there’s a few chapters at the beginning of a book that are fairly linear, or a few chapters at the end trying to tie everything together, and those are better off not being part of the partitioning process.

The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker
- 8 chapters that are all relatively self contained and iterate on the same themes.
Working by Studs Terkel
- This book is huge and has hundreds of interviews with different people, who talk about what they do at their jobs. It’s also a great look at American life in the 70s. It’s organized into nine sections called “books”, I’d partition out by book and then ask people to read one or two interviews from the book they’ve chosen.
Part I of Mythologies by Roland Barthes
- Seminal book in the slightly mystifying field of semiotics, which could be frustrating for a rat group to try to grok. Especially since the examples are now all 70 years out of date. But what a fun challenge that would be!
- Each essay is really short (like 2-5 paperback pages) and there’s like 30 of them; maybe encourage people to pick two or three each.
- Could pair with an activity where you bring up modern ads and try to give analysis the same way.^[3]
Second half of Behave by Robert Sapolsky
- It seems like the first half of the book is fairly linear and then the second half starts analyzing specific dynamics (ingroups, morality, warmongering, etc). So it’s probably a read intro plus chapter 1 and then only release second half chapters for dibs angle, similar to what I’ve done for The Elephant in the Brain.
Likely many pop science books
- Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner
- The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb
- Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Very likely most readers and anthologies
- Essay collections of essays by specific writers, such as David Foster Wallace
- Annual collections such as “The Best American Science and Nature Writing”; “The Best American Essays”
- Academic readers, such as “Disputed Moral Issues”, “Contemporary Debates in Bioethics”, “The Transgender Studies Reader”, and readers in literally any other field your little heart can dream of. Google or your favourite LLM can help you find them. Academic readers are often broken down into half a dozen parts, with half a dozen chapters in each part. I think I would assign the reader introduction to everyone, and people can call dibs on reading the intro to each part plus which ever chapter in that part that looks the most interesting to them. Readers work better than textbooks, because readers are anthology collections of essays, and essays are self-contained.
Wikipedia has a list of essays by decade (sadly but understandably western-centric), but it is frustratingly then broken down by year, which I think is too specific. It could be cool to just pick a decade (or any range of years^[4]) and then ask people to read the most interesting to them essay from it. The organizer should ideally do the work of compiling a list of all the viable essays for their time range beforehand and putting it up in an excel document.
University course syllabuses have lots of readings and are wonderful resources imo. Google “[desired topic] syllabus” or go through your files for the ones from your favourite classes, extract all the readings (with or without the supplementary ones that no one ever actually read), and get folks to call dibs on readings the normal way. You might want to have them read the syllabus as well.

I would be very happy to receive suggestions of other books or readings that can work for this format of event in the comments :D

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...I say this but I’ve gotten away with 4 days
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For some books, you may also need to get everyone to read Chapter 1, and maybe the conclusion, but I think in general the introduction section for any non-fiction book works as the essay-length version of it, which means you don’t really need to read anything else to get the gist/thesis of the book in broad strokes.
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ChatGPT actually does this pretty well! If you feed it an image or some copy and ask it for an analysis in the style of Roland Barthes, it generally gives you something passably insightful.
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You can do something funky with this, like, “essays from when you were 0-12 years old”, “essays from when your parents were in their twenties”, etc.