All posts tagged: curious reading club

Craig Mod: “We’re probably doing a lot of things the wrong way”

March 6, 2026
by Bobbie Johnson
Leave a comment
interviews
Author Craig Mod on a zoom call, wearing a dark grey baseball cap and light grey long sleeve shirt, his fingers to his head in a gesture of mind explodeyness.

A few weeks back I had a really stimulating conversation with Craig Mod, the bookmaker, writer, photographer and author of Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir, which was February’s book of the month at Curious Reading Club. One thing I mentioned in our chat was that Craig actually has had a profound impact on my career, in a way he probably doesn’t remember and certainly didn’t expect. Maybe 15 years ago I bumped into […]

David Baron: The Martians used to be the good guys

December 30, 2025
by Bobbie Johnson
Leave a comment
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
Leave a comment
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 […]

A new side project: Curious Reading Club

May 2, 2024
by Bobbie Johnson
Leave a comment
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 […]