The Ordinary Joe Book Club — no meetings, no homework. Just good books, read slow, and a place to talk about them. Here’s what’s on the nightstand.
How it works
- One book at a time, about six weeks per book. Read slow — that’s the point.
- Three emails per book: a kickoff (why this book), a mid-book check-in, and a wrap.
- Join in by email anytime — send a favorite passage or a thought whenever one hits you.
- The wrap turns into a podcast segment: favorite passages and takeaways, on the show.
- Two house rules: no spoilers past the current section, and disagree like friends.
The pace: Striking Thoughts is a page a day — send me your favorite quote of the week. White Noise is about 55 pages a week, done in six weeks without trying.
Striking Thoughts — Bruce Lee
Reading now
Bruce Lee’s own words, gathered from his notebooks and letters — more than 800 short pieces on everything from fear and failure to art and daily living, edited by John Little. This is the book behind my Be Water project: Lee’s philosophy, straight from the source. A page a day, and it still hits.
Be Water: Bruce Lee’s Playbook for Life — Bruce Radaikin
My upcoming book — in progress
Mine. Not a biography — a playbook. Every chapter pairs one of Lee’s ideas from Striking Thoughts with a moment from his films, plus a way to use it in an ordinary life. Being written now — book club members hear about it first.
White Noise — Don DeLillo
Up next
Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel about Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler studies who fears death more than anything, raising a family in a town soaked in consumer noise — until an ‘airborne toxic event’ makes the noise literal. It won the National Book Award, became a Noah Baumbach film, and feels like it was written about right now. This is the next read.
Join the book club
Want in? Email me and tell me what you’re reading — that’s the whole application.