I have a suggestion that is a new release. My friend Karen Bender’s book Refund is getting excellent reviews. It is a set of 9 short stories dealing with the theme of money. Here’s a link to a recent review: http://mirabiledictu.org/2015/01/20/karen-e-benders-refund/
I think the topic of money is one that is interesting to BoingBoingers and these might be a good jumping off point for discussion.
Done. I don’t think @miasm has posted the other one yet, though.
My suggestions (and reasons for suggesting) are:
Fiction:
The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (My friend is desperate for me to read this, she says the titular character reminds her of me.)
Sacred Time by Ursula Hegi (Girlfriend gave to me to read.)
S. (It’s been staring at me from various friends’ bookshelves.)
Non-fiction:
Similar to @anon61221983’s suggestion of The Israel Lobby but I think more interesting an far-reaching is The Holocaust Industry (Another “Haven’t read, but desperately want to.”)
Persepolis (I’ve not actually read it, yet. I keep meaning to)
A Brief History of Diaries (It’s a tiny, cheap little book. I feel like it’s excellent book-club fodder.)
The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Because nuclear.) By Richard Rhodes.
I’ve joined loomio but not in the group yet, will post as soon as I’m approved.
Done.
Hey everybody!
Looks like the following BBSers have signed up, does anyone else want to join or can we close the gates?
@aeon
@anon67050589
@chuckv
@daneel
@Donald_Petersen
@ignatius
@jlw
@othermichael
@anon61221983
@noahdjango
I replied to Raita as you can only @ ‘mention’ 10 users in a post.
I think I was last to sign up, slowpoke that I am.
This is closed for selection, correct? We will announce the books we select here and open discussion to the public? Future selections we can re-evaluate the process?
I always have fear when I hear “Close” in relation to people joining some club. I think closed for the first round is fair, people have had time to join. If someone wants to read or help select next time, they should be able to?
I know, I am being a baby.
Yeah, I lean a little too heavily on manipulative language.
I was trying to encourage others to join but maybe I need to dial that back a little. 
I really just meant, ‘can we close the sign-up process and start to vote?’
Now that I think about it, what’s to stop others from joining in after we’ve chosen a book? I’m not really sure how the membership of loomio works. Can you have pre-approved-for the-next-round-members?
Edit: For what it’s worth, bbs-peeps-that-haven’t-signed-up, I recommend it. Looks like a pretty effective platform for decision making.
Yeah, the plan was to have voting there, and discussion back here. We do want as many people as possible involved in the selection process so there is no hurt feelings when we decide on a book.
I don’t know… do you think there is anyway we could get the discourse folks to set up some kind of voting type thing in house here? That might be a nice thing to have in the future. I think we were kicking around the idea of doing this quarterly maybe - 3 or 4 times a year, so as to not overwhelm us and give us all plenty of time to read and digest whatever we decide to read. But if in the future, we could do everything here, that would be helpful. We just couldn’t figure out a way to elegantly do it on the boards…
But now that song “elegantly wasted” is stuck in my head… 
Hi all- If you have any final selections, go post them and we can start voting soon. Also, if you don’t want to sign up for loomio, maybe you can tell someone who is on there to vote for you perhaps… Maybe we can figure some way to do this on the boards next time…
Norman Finkelstein is AMAZING!!! He actually was denied tenure for his political views!
Persepolis is fantastic, too.
You can do voting in here. Someone did it a while back. Not sure how…@codinghorror?
Ah! Well, now we know for next time. I should have just asked @codinghorror, huh?
I set up a poll in The Lounge.
You just need to create a topic with title
Poll: NNN*
Then create a list in your first blurb, it gets automagically converted to a selectable list of buttons.
*Where NNN is your Poll title.
Awesome! Remind me or @Raita of this next time we do this!
coolio, I’m digging how the loomio thing works (after being so reticent) but it would be interesting to see if it could work over here too.
Yeah, I like having as much possible here, since this is where the community is… but the loomio seems pretty good. I like that it’s open source, of course and I appreciate the functionality. But I’m a little worried that people are going to be turned off and feel left out by having the voting elsewhere.
Agreed. I like giving @codinghorror a chance to show off how great Discourse is.
FWIW I was a threaded forum fan prior to discourse. I am now a convert.
Yeah, I’m really liking this system - it’s kind of the only online community that I interact with on a regular basis and this is part of the reason I continue to stick around. I especially like that @codinghorror is around to hear our complaints and act on them. It gives it a real sense of community around there, that we are actively helping to build the system that we’re interacting through. That, to me, was always the real promise of open source software, in relation to the interwebs - making it more interactive and not yet another passive media for us to only consume. Even though I don’t code and kind of suck at it anyway, I like to know that my input matters to people who are out there writing code for stuff I’m using.
Hmph.
Unless… can you do polls outside The Lounge?
In which case, I retract my Hmph.
Have they mounted my name on a brass plaque above the door yet? 
OH, that’s right the Lounge is for the bourgeois elite around here, not for us working class lumpen-proletariate!
