What we’re about
This club will not tell you what to read, instead, you can tell us what you have read / watched / listened.
Any non-fiction material: a popular science book, a documentary, a lecture, or a part of it - anything with a title and author, and that contains some coherent ideas.
We do not do retelling of fiction. Any non-fiction will do, but there must be ideas in it, not just facts. (I find the biographies and autobiographies usually full of facts, but lacking ideas.) And preferably, with some supporting proof base for those ideas too, to save everyone's time discussing pure speculations.
40 minutes per book, including summary (10-30 min) and discussion (accordingly).
You can read notes or parts of the book, bring pictures and draw graphs, sing and dance - as long as it can effectively convey the summary of the book.
We have people from different countries, so the language of the meetings is English.
Introvert friendly.
It is possible to join for listening without bringing your own book (yet ;)).
We meet in public places, usually in coffee shops, but in good weather (which is rare in Hong Kong) the meeting can take place outdoors in a park. All meetings are on the HK side.
Usually we have at least one BYOBook meeting per month, on Saturday. A weekday evening session is possible if there is a demand for it.
Normally, a meeting takes around 2,5-3 hours. During this time we discuss 2 different books presented by two members (please send your book's title and author in advance - first received first added to the lineup :)))
Our second host Kartika also arranges "Book Of The Month" (BOTM) assigned reading sessions. These will work as an ordinary book club: a book is announced a month before, and everybody is supposed to read the same book for the meeting.
There is a fee of 20 HKD for the first timers to help funding the Meetup membership. As this is the one-time fee, only for your first meeting, it will definitely pay up if you attend more events afterwards ;))
RSVP is required. Coordination will be done in a WhatsApp group. You will need to tell the book's title and author in advance - the easiest way is to send a Goodreads link. Send a message via Meetup to join the WhatsApp group.
We started in spring 2021, and since then nearly a hundred books have been presented by BYOBook members. The full list is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/63994563?shelf=byobook.
And here are some examples of the books (for indexing purposes:)))
'Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?' by Frans de Waal
'A Brief History of Time' by Stephen Hawking
'Poor Economics: Rethinking Poverty & the Ways to End it' by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo
'Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence' by Max Tegmark
'The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins
'Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions' by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths
'Civilization: The West and the Rest' by Niall Ferguson
'The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter' by Joseph Henrich
'The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time' by Yascha Mounk
'Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space' by Kevin Peter Hand
Also check out our friends "Skeptics in the Pub": https://www.meetup.com/skeptics-in-the-pub-hk/. The group's mission is to support scientific education, critical thinking and an evidence based understanding of the natural world.
