The Weird Loner Club

20200319

The Weird Loner Club (2015-2020) was a book club I started with a few colleagues to focus on “heavy books”. That is, dense, difficult books on politics, history, science, religion, economics, biographies, and the like. My initial proposal email to JH, LB, and X can be found here. Basically, we’d rotate picking the books and every four weeks, we’d jump on a conference line (back in the days of yore pre-Zoom), and discuss the book we’d just read.

We eventually had to kick X out due to a business deal gone wrong (he ghosted on a contract and he’s X because he doesn’t even deserve an initial for what he did, costing me tens of thousands in business), and then LB went back to school to get a MBA, at which point, I reached out to some new blood with a revised invitation email.

Four of the new invites didn’t last very long. One had a business that took off, two just couldn’t see themselves doing this after one book, and a fourth guy kept picking the most boring books and never showed up for the calls… leaving the disgruntled remainder to discuss a book we all hated and grousing at the fact the person who picked the book wasn’t even in attendance.

That said, the new group thrived with JH, L, R, T, and OH from mid-2016 onwards. That was, until 2020. Near the end of the book club’s life, we had a string of books that everyone ranked low and we were simply tired of reading books that were a slog. Despite a valiant attempt to save the club (with a fancy nomination and vetoing system, all designed in an eleventh hour frenzy), quarantine happened, and it sort of ended up becoming a excuse to let the book club die. The last few planned books are strong though. I intend to read them still. And look, as I write this (2024-01-04), our last planned book became a Scorcese film with Leo.

Some Random Bits

For some reason, there were a few books the Weird Loner Club picked where the author died shortly after we picked their book. Obviously, correlation isn’t causation. But you could argue that we killed Herman Wouk.
The name Weird Loner Club came about when OH was having a difficult, stressful day, and she wasn’t going to attend the call, but then her wife told her, “Look, you always feel better after talking to those weird loners on that book club of yours.” The name stuck.
My god, some of those books we slogged through and hate-read were truly, utterly horrible. But there were some shining gems as well. Without wading through the spreadsheet below, here were books that scored an average of 4.5 and above (discounting average scores with less than three rankings):
- Dying Every Day (2014) by James Romm, selected by JH
- A People’s History of the United States (1980) by Howard Zinn, selected by yours truly
- Open (2009) by Andre Agassi, selected by JH
- Alexander Hamilton (2004) by Ron Chernow, selected by OH
- Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber, selected by OH
- A Thousand Naked Strangers (2016) by Kevin Hazzard, selected by R
- Bad Blood (2018) by John Carreyrou, selected by T
- Circe (2018) by Madeline Miller, selected by OH

So had this been a game on who picks the best books, the winner is clearly OH.

A Reading History of the Weird Loner Club

	Title	Author	Call	Pkr	AVG
1	The Snowball	Alice Schroeder	15/01/23	LB	5.00
2	Economics in One Lesson	Henry Hayzlitt	15/02/13	C	4.33
3	The True Believer	Eric Hoffer	15/03/06	X	4.67
4	Warren Buffett Accounting Book	Pysh & Brodersen	15/03/27	LB	1.00
5	Competition Demystified	Bruce Greenwald	15/04/03	LB	4.00
6	The Black Swan	Nassim Nicholas Taleb	15/05/05	JH	4.40
7	Thinking, Fast and Slow	Daniel Kahneman	15/06/26	C	3.00
8	Surely, You’re Joking Mr. Feynman	Richard P. Feynman	15/07/24	X	4.50
9	The Art of Learning	Joshua Waitzkin	15/08/15	LB	5.00
10	Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance	Robert M. Pirsig	15/09/11	JH	2.33
11	The Cold War	John Gaddis	15/10/16	C	4.00
12	The Age of Spiritual Machines	Ray Kurzweil	15/11/13	X	3.00
13	The Three Rules	Mumtaz Ahmed	15/12/18	LB	1.00
14	When Things Fall Apart	Pema Chodron	15/12/29	JH	5.00
15	The Audacity to Win	David Plouffe	16/01/22	C	5.00
16	The Power of Now	Eckhart Tolle	16/02/26	X	4.50
17	Dying Every Day	James Romm	16/03/31	JH	4.67
18	The Punic Wars	Adrian Goldsworthy	16/04/28	C	4.33
19	A Path Appears	Kristof & WuDunn	16/05/19	LK	4.00
20	Business Adventures	John Brooks	16/06/09	X	1.33
21	Gates of Fire	Steven Pressfield	16/06/30	JH	3.00
22	A People’s History of the United States	Howard Zinn	16/08/11	C	4.60
23	The Origin of Virtue	Matt Ridley	16/09/01	LK	3.80
24	Oryx & Crake	Margaret Atwood	16/10/06	R	3.67
25	One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel Garcia Marquez	16/11/03	T	4.33
26	Console Wars	Blake J. Harris	16/12/08	LB	4.00
27	The Year of the Flood	Margaret Atwood	17/01/19	D	2.67
28	Open	Andre Agassi	17/02/09	JH	4.60
29	Alexander Hamilton	Ron Chernow	17/03/30	OH	5.00
30	On Looking	Alexandra Horowitz	17/04/20	C	1.90
31	East of Eden	John Steinbeck	17/06/08	R	4.25
32	American Pastoral	Philip Roth	17/07/06	T	3.00
33	The Master and Margarita	Mikhail Bulgakov	17/08/17	LL	2.71
34	Musashi	Eiji Yoshikawa	17/10/19	JH	3.14
35	Debt: The First 5000 Years	David Graeber	17/11/16	OH	4.50
36	Gödel, Escher, Bach	Douglas Hofstadter	18/03/08	X²	4.08
37	When China Rules The World	Martin Jacques	18/05/31	C	2.50
38	House of Leaves	Mark Z. Danielewski	18/07/19	P	3.83
39	A Thousand Naked Strangers	Kevin Hazzard	N/A	R	4.50
40	The Importance of Living	Lin Yutang	18/09/20	R	3.25
41	Bad Blood	John Carreyrou	18/10/11	T	5.00
42	Lincoln’s Melancholy	Joshua Wolf Shenk	18/11/15	JH	3.92
43	Congo	David Van Reybrouck	19/03/07	OH	4.08
44	Flatland	Edwin Abbott	NA	X²	2.25
45	Against Empathy	Paul Bloom	19/05/09	X²	1.75
46	Circe	Madeline Miller	19/05/30	OH	5.00
47	The Caine Mutiny	Herman Wouk	19/08/15	T	4.20
48	Making Sense of the Troubles	David McKittrick	19/11/14	C	2.83
49	Foucault’s Pendulum	Umberto Eco	20/01/23	OH	2.92
50	Under the Volcano	Malcolm Lowry	20/03/19	R	2.50
51	The Empire of the Summer Moon	S.C. Gwynne		JH
52	The Age of Insight	Eric Kandel		OH
53	Exhalation	Ted Chiang		JH
54	Song of Solomon	Toni Morrison		T
55	Code	Charles Petzold		C
56	Killers of the Flower Moon	David Grann		R