All posts tagged: books

David Baron: The Martians used to be the good guys

December 30, 2025
by Bobbie Johnson
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books

December’s Curious Reading Club book is The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America by former NPR science editor David Baron—a rollicking read about the gilded age’s obsession with aliens, and the space-obsessed Boston brahmin Percival Lowell who made it happen. David’s book looks at how the craze took hold, what it meant, and how it fell apart… and why we’re still obsessed anyway. I was particularly taken by the […]

Tania Branigan: “Everybody thinks they would have been in the Resistance in wartime.”

November 24, 2025
by Bobbie Johnson
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interviews

This month’s Curious Reading Club pick is Tania Branigan’s Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution (WW Norton, 2023). It’s an absolutely fascinating look at people’s memories of this turbulent, horrific period of recent Chinese history, and how people wrestle with what they have done and what they didn’t do. Tania is an old colleague of mine from the Guardian: I once visited her in Beijing while I was on assignment for this Wired […]

Talking books, talking ideas

October 19, 2025
by Bobbie Johnson
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Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI, during our talk about the book in June 2025

For those who aren’t following along, I run a small book subscription service called Curious Reading Club. It’s focused on sharing non-fiction books that I’ve enjoyed, often about science, technology, history and society—mostly new (but not always) and with a curveball memoir or handbook thrown in for fun now and then.  The books I choose are generally written from a journalistic point of view, and I particularly try to find titles and authors that deserve […]

A new side project: Curious Reading Club

May 2, 2024
by Bobbie Johnson
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books / Work

A few weeks ago I announced a little hobby project that I’ve been working on: Curious Reading Club. I’d love it if you became a member. The idea is pretty simple: I pick a terrific non-fiction book each month, send a copy to you, then we come together and talk with the author and each other. Membership costs $25 each month—that’s cheaper than the cost of buying the book itself—and you get a few little […]

Things I like, November 2023: The niche unbundling edition

November 19, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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Media / Newsletter / Things my friends have made

The first thing I noticed when opening up Good Tape, a new print magazine for the audio industry put together by my friend Alana Levinson and crew, was how BIG it is. Broadsheet format. Newsprint. This is how we used to read the news! But there’s a lot you can do with those huge spreads, and they have a lot of fun with it. There’s not a lot of information online about its contents, so […]

Infinite jest

October 19, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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books

I haven’t read Going Infinite, the new Michael Lewis book on Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX. I’ve enjoyed some of his past work. Clearly there have been some major questions raised about previous stories, and I do wonder about the speed at which these semi-biographical tomes are being turned out across the industry: for example Lewis’s pandemic book, The Premonition, came out in May 2021… which feels a little early to be declaring […]

Ghosts

October 9, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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Media

Writing is many things, and one of them is channeling. As a writer you are a conduit, a crucible. You are a voice, whether you are interrogating your own ideas, bringing life to characters fictional or real, or simply reporting what you have seen so that others can understand. When you write you are often channeling other people directly, and when you are not it is because you are doing it indirectly: building on the […]

Things I found this week (53)

January 5, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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books / Link / Media / Things my friends have made

• Brocken spectres are the terrifying ghosts that appear when you cast a shadow on a cloud that has a light source behind it.  • Marcin Wichary is getting ready to launch his many–years-in-the-making book about keyboards, Shift Happens. The effort and dedication to making this thing is visible in every element of how he has put it together, including the book’s delightful website. • Did you know the CIA has a museum?

Slowdown

July 21, 2021
by Bobbie Johnson
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Media

I started tracking my book reading habits a few years ago as a way of remembering what I’ve been consuming. Extra benefit: It’s also helped me see patterns or trends. The trouble is that I can also now look back and see when I’m losing the plot. Here’s what I mean: Last year my reading pace felt like it had fallen off a cliff—there were three months or so of total freeze during the pandemic. […]

Which books do you truly love?

July 18, 2021
by Bobbie Johnson
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Media

“I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, the beloved tale becomes a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives. A book may cease to speak to us as we grow older, and our feeling for it will fade. Or we may suddenly, as our lives shape and hopefully […]