Schedule & Reading List
Socialization is from 7:00p – 7:30p on meeting nights. Book discussion from 7:30p-until. We meet at my house on Innsbruck Drive, outdoors unless it’s raining (then, garage). We usually wrap up between 10 and 10:30. The Amazon links below are affiliate links and proceeds are used to fill the beer fridge. If you can’t see the links, disable your adblocker for this site (whitelist).
Participation requires 2 commitments: we will make 50%+ of the meetings and we will read 50%+ of each book. Without these, our discussion is hindered by the lack of trust and common (reading) vocabulary.
For 2025, we’re changing things up just a bit. The structure and goal of our discussions will be less focused on the content of the books and more about the men around the circle. For each discussion, you should come to the meeting prepared to discuss three instances of:
- A part that reminded you of a personal experience (nostalgic, thankful, painful)
- A part that demonstrates, teaches, or suggests a lesson or practice that is important to you (or the opposite)
- A part that speaks to something you’d like to do or try (why? What’s your plan to do so?)
- A part that you enjoyed so much you re-read and want to re-read to us (do so and explain what about it struck you)
- A part that is connected to a lesson or theme we covered in a previous book (What’s the same as that lesson? What’s different?)
Tuesday January 7, 2025
Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers
Ralph Moody
260 pages; 8:10 audiobook
Ralph Moody was eight years old in 1906 when his family moved from New Hampshire to a Colorado ranch. Through his eyes we experience the pleasures and perils of ranching there early in the twentieth century. Auctions and roundups, family picnics, irrigation wars, tornadoes and wind storms give authentic color to Little Britches. So do adventures, wonderfully told, that equip Ralph to take his father’s place when it becomes necessary.
Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Liquid Rules: The Delightful & Dangerous Substances that Flow Through Our Lives
Mark Miodownik
256 pages; 7:16 audiobook
We know that we need water to survive, and that, for some of us, a cup of coffee or a glass of wine can feel just as vital. But do we really understand how much we rely on liquids, or their destructive power? Set on one of the author’s transatlantic flights, Liquid Rules offers readers a tour of these formless substances, told through the language of molecules, droplets, heartbeats, and ocean waves. We encounter fluids within the plane―from hand soap to liquid crystal display screens―and without: in the volcanoes of Iceland, the frozen expanse of Greenland, and the marvelous California coastline. We come to see liquids with wonder and fascination, and to understand their potential for death and destruction. Mark Miodownik’s unique brand of scientific storytelling brings his subject to life in ways that will inform and amuse science buffs and lay readers alike.
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
The Green Mile
Stephen King
432 pages; 13:53 audiobook
Welcome to Cold Mountain Penitentiary, home to the Depression-worn men of E Block. Convicted killers all, each awaits his turn to walk “the Green Mile,” the lime-colored linoleum corridor leading to a final meeting with Old Sparky, Cold Mountain’s electric chair. Prison guard Paul Edgecombe has seen his share of oddities over the years working the Mile, but he’s never seen anything like John Coffey—a man with the body of a giant and the mind of a child, condemned for a crime terrifying in its violence and shocking in its depravity. And in this place of ultimate retribution, Edgecombe is about to discover the terrible, wondrous truth about John Coffey—a truth that will challenge his most cherished beliefs….
Tuesday, April 15, 2025
No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men
Anthony Esolen
204 pages; 6:59 audiobook
It’s time to end the apology tour for traditional masculinity. A generation of young men and boys are being raised in self-loathing, taught that the core of their identity as men is not only abhorrent, but is responsible for humanity’s ills.
No Apologies is a powerful defense of the virtues of masculine strength. From the thankless brute force of the nameless men who erected buildings, paved roads, and cleared the ground upon which human society stands, to the boundless energy of youth that compelled centuries of global exploration, to the father’s embodied authority as protector, director, and exemplar of law and justice, Esolen shows how civilization has rested upon the strength of men.
Wednesday, May 7, 2025
Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon (Special Edition)
Paul Simon, Bruce Headlam, Malcolm Gladwell
Audio only; 5:45 audiobook
Part memoir, part investigation, and unlike any creative portrait you’ve ever heard before. Recorded over a series of 30 hours of conversation between Simon, Gladwell, and Gladwell’s oldest friend and co-writer, journalist and Broken Record podcast co-host Bruce Headlam, the conversation flows from Simon’s music, to his childhood in Queens, NY, to his frequent collaborators including Art Garfunkel and the nature of creativity itself. Gladwell and Headlam traveled from the mountains of Hawaii to Simon’s own backyard studio to record an artist they’ve idolized since childhood.
The result is an intimate audio biography of one of America’s most popular songwriters. Brimming with music, and conversation, Miracle and Wonder is a window into Simon’s legendary career, what it means to be alive as an artist, and how to create work that endures.
Tuesday, June 3, 2025
Winterdance : Fine Madness of Alaskan Dog-Racing
Gary Paulsen
336 pages; 6:56 audiobook
Gary Paulsen was in his forties, an internationally famous children’s writer. Then he was overtaken by his passion – a passion for Alaskan dog-racing and a passion for the wild, beautiful landscape of the Arctic. Winterdance is the story of this passion. It is a powerful, almost unbelievable adventure, told with humour, pathos, vitality and excitement. Beautiful, funny and laconic, it is a book about men and dogs and their souls.
Wednesday, August 6, 2025 (Two Month Gap)
Project Hail Mary
Andy Weir
496 pages; 16:10 audiobook
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.
Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species. And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone.
Or does he?
Wednesday, September 3, 2025
The Match: The Day the Game of Golf Changed Forever
Mark Frost
288 pages; 8:37 audiobook
The year: 1956. Decades have passed since Eddie Lowery came to fame as the ten-year-old caddie to U.S. Open Champion Francis Ouimet. Now a wealthy car dealer and avid supporter of amateur golf, Lowery has just made a bet with fellow millionaire George Coleman. Lowery claims that two of his employees, amateur golfers Harvie Ward and Ken Venturi, cannot be beaten in a best-ball match, and challenges Coleman to bring any two golfers of his choice to the course at 10 a.m. the next day to settle the issue. Coleman accepts the challenge and shows up with his own power team: Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson, the game’s greatest living professionals, with fourteen major championships between them.
Tuesday, October 7, 2025
The World’s Largest Man: a memoir
Harrison Scott Key
368 pages; 9:04 audiobook
Harrison Scott Key was born in Memphis, but he grew up in Mississippi, among pious, Bible-reading women and men who either shot things or got women pregnant. At the center of his world was his larger-than-life father—a hunter, a fighter, a football coach, “a man better suited to living in a remote frontier wilderness of the nineteenth century than contemporary America, with all its progressive ideas, and paved roads, and lack of armed duels. He was a great man, and he taught me many things: How to fight, how to work, how to cheat, how to pray to Jesus about it, how to kill things with guns and knives and, if necessary, with hammers.”
Harrison, with his love of books and excessive interest in hugging, couldn’t have been less like Pop, and when it became clear that he was not able to kill anything very well or otherwise make his father happy, he resolved to become everything his father was not: an actor, a Presbyterian, and a doctor of philosophy. But when it was time to settle down and start a family of his own, Harrison started to view his father in a new light, and realized—for better and for worse—how much of his old man he’d absorbed.
Tuesday, November 4, 2025
Greenlights
Matthew McConaughey
320 pages; 6:51 audiobook
“I’ve been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me.
Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life’s challenges—how to get relative with the inevitable—you can enjoy a state of success I call “catching greenlights.””
It’s a love letter. To life. It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights—and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too.
Wednesday, December 17, 2025
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Michael Pollan
450 pages; 15:53 audiobook
What should we have for dinner? Ten years ago, Michael Pollan confronted us with this seemingly simple question and, with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, his brilliant and eye-opening exploration of our food choices, demonstrated that how we answer it today may determine not only our health but our survival as a species. In the years since, Pollan’s revolutionary examination has changed the way Americans think about food. Bringing wide attention to the little-known but vitally important dimensions of food and agriculture in America, Pollan launched a national conversation about what we eat and the profound consequences that even the simplest everyday food choices have on both ourselves and the natural world. Ten years later, The Omnivore’s Dilemma continues to transform the way Americans think about the politics, perils, and pleasures of eating.
What I Think 