Gunpowder & Lead is sponsoring a book group! Here’s the idea: every 3-4 months, one person in the group (of 6-7 people) will choose the book that everyone will be reading. It can be any book, on any subject, fiction or non-fiction. The idea is that if the books are generally chosen by individuals rather than by consensus, we are more likely to read something we wouldn’t necessarily choose for ourselves. It’s a way of expanding our viewpoints. Additionally, it will mean that the responses to each book will be from people with a wide range of expertise on the topic of the selected book, which will give us a variety of perspectives.

Once the book is chosen, we’ll announce it here so that anyone who wants to read along and participate in the discussion can do so, and we’ll leave the comment thread of the announcement post open for anyone who wants to discuss anything about the book before the deadline. At the end of the allotted time, everyone in the main book group will write a short response/review which will be posted here on G&L. Following that post, we will host a discussion on Twitter for everyone who has read along.

For our first book group selection, we have chosen Steve Inskeep‘s Instant City, one of the most frequently mentioned books in our #bestbooks 2012 discussion.

The confirmed readers for this round are me, Diana, and Daveed from G&L, along with Sina Kashefipour - who first suggested a book group - Rebecca Johnson, and Nathan Finney. We plan to post our reviews and host the discussion on Instant City during the week of February 18-22. I’m looking forward to a great conversation, and I hope many will take part!