Linux Outlaws Reading Group discussion

This is a continuation of the thread on Literary Outlaws

I suggest we collect books in a couple of lists: overall list of books we want to consider and a short list of books we are going to vote on now. The shortlisted books would have something in common - genre or topic and now and then we'd switch the shortlist for more variety.

At the moment I'm trying to come up with suggestions for the books more or less in line with Little Brother, but different enough.

Ok. Should we do some "genre" picking and then go over to the books? If so, let me suggest

- Horror
- Historic Novells
- Sci-Fi
- Distopia? (I guess that's the genre that the books Aptëm suggested fall into right?)

How about tech focused Zeitgeist books as well? So I'm thinking of ones like Barefoot Into Cyberspace by Becky Hogge and The Revolution Will Be Digitised by Heather Brooke

I'm up for most genres but as I haven't read much historic fiction, I'd be especially interested in that :) Barefoot Into Cyberspace is a really good book too!

So, should we put this for vote on genres?

Horror
- Historic Novells
- Sci-Fi
- Distopia? (I guess that's the genre that the books Aptëm suggested fall into right?)
- Tech focused zeitgeist books (Aren't all zeitgeist books tech focused though? I meant that with Distopia)
- Cyberpunk?

In my opinion "genres" isn't a useful category for choosing what to read. Especially because many great books combine genres or refuse to be neatly categorized.

may be it could be easier to focus on topics and to keep in mind a next topic to pursue (but not necessarily ever to return to, once we're done with it).

Zeitgeist simply means "spirit of the time times" so those kind of books can be fairly broad in their subject.

If we wanted to focus on topics then we could look at taking current news headlines and picking books based around that subject? So we could take something like the current news item of Google being investigated for capturing sensitive information from internet users and picking a book with that has a central theme of corporations knowing everything about us?

Артём wrote: "In my opinion "genres" isn't a useful category for choosing what to read. Especially because many great books combine genres or refuse to be neatly categorized.

may be it could be easier to focus..."

Well, frankly I am willing to go either way, just wanted to get this started ;)

So, you want to choose a subject/topic instead? Fine by me, Zeitgeist?