Hello! Starting in January 2025, I’m hosting a virtual book club. We will be meeting for 1 hour every other week to talk about the reading and hang out.

What are we reading?

The inaugural book will be “Data & Reality” by Bill Kent (2nd ed).

Once more: we are not modeling reality, but the way information about reality is processed, by people.

— Bill Kent, Data & Reality

Why “Data & Reality”? Because! If the above quote isn’t enough of a clue, this book provides a philosophical foundation for our work as data people. And philosophy is meant to be discussed, which makes it a perfect book club book.

You can download a PDF of this book at: https://github.com/jhulick/bookstuff/blob/master/Data%20and%20Reality.pdf

If you’d like to put this book on your e-reader and need to convert it, I recommend using Calibre.

But Jenna, why the 2nd edition? Well, first of all it’s free and readily available via the above link, so it is accessible. But the canonical answer is in this blog post from Hillel Wayne. If you really want a physical book, you can get the 3rd edition, but be warned that the content is not the same.

When are we meeting?

Starting Jan 2nd, we’ll be meeting every other Thursday at 7pm ET.

To subscribe to the Google Calendar with all events (and the meeting link), click here, and then click the “Add to Google Calendar” link in the bottom left corner.

The Google Calendar event includes the reading assignment (in the title), the Google Meet link (for live discussions), and the Google Doc (each event will have a tab) for async discussions/notes/etc.

Why start a book club?

  1. Because other people said I should
  2. Because I’ve always wanted to
  3. Because I can gather together people who want to read the same books I want to read and then we can all talk about it, which happens to be my idea of fun
  4. Because I said I would
  5. Accountability for reading nonfiction books I genuinely want to read but struggle with because… nonfiction