🚨 Announcing…The Ink Book Club 📚

A book club about democracy, for readers of The Ink

Welcome to the club!

Today, we’re launching something very special at The Ink — something that we’re very excited about and think you’ll love: a book club, about democracy. And more.

We've been talking for a while about choosing bloomscrolling over doomscrolling, and this is the natural next step. What better way to go deeper into the issues, and to feed our minds and souls, than through reading and connecting around books?

To launch and direct the club, we’re teaming up with the prominent critic and editor Leigh Haber, who ran Oprah’s Book Club for a decade and is simply the best person out there to lead us on this new adventure. Says Leigh:

“I’m thrilled to bring my learnings from ten years directing Oprah’s Book Club to Anand’s community. Oprah always said authors are her rock stars. In this crucial moment, we need their inspiration and insights more than ever.”

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Why a democracy book club? Thomas Jefferson may never actually have written that “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people,” but the NEA’s 2004 Reading at Risk report did come out and say that “a well-read citizenry is essential to a vibrant democracy.”

We endorse that position wholeheartedly, and we’re taking that as our starting point. But while building democracy is a big part of the reason we read newsletters like this one, it’s only part of the reason we read overall. Books are paths to understanding ourselves and others, and to understanding the world, and they can also be a balm in troubled times.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin observed, “but then you read.”

And as the novelist Jane Smiley has put it, “Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”

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How it works

Each month, we’ll select a new book, drawing from the best new nonfiction and fiction titles and revisiting the most relevant classics.

To direct our reading, we’ll publish a discussion guide, with weekly prompts and questions from Leigh, posted on Wednesdays and weekends. Throughout the month, you’ll get opportunities to share your thinking with your fellow readers: we’ll offer discussions in our chat, in the comments sections of our Book Club posts, and in Live conversations.

And on that note, once we’re a few weeks into each book’s reading cycle, we’ll host a Live conversation with the author (or, in the case of classics or where the author is unavailable, with a critic or scholar with an illuminating take on the book).

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Join The Ink — and The Ink Book Club — today.

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Let’s get started, with Abundance

The first book we’ll read together is Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, arguably the book of this moment, and one that offers not just a critique of where America has gone wrong in recent decades, but a progressive plan for building the future, and a vision of how we can begin to set things right by imagining the better tomorrow, no matter how big a challenge it seems to do that imagining right now. And a book that has invited a lot of controversy and retort, which we are also excited to dive into.

It’s a provocative book that we think is worth the debate — and we can’t think of a more perfect title for our community to begin discussing.

“We have a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life.” — Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

We’ll be hosting Ezra and Derek for a live conversation about the book and the future of the abundance agenda on Wednesday, May 21 at 12:00 p.m. Eastern.

So let’s roll up our sleeves. Start by grabbing a copy of Abundance at Bookshop.org (just click the button below), or at your local independent bookstore, or check out a copy from your favorite library.

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