NYTimes.com - A Book Club Courts Liberals

I've just heard about the new Progressive Book Club in Motoko Rich's "A Book Club Courts Liberals" published June 16, 2008 in the New York Times.

Members can join and buy three books at $1 apiece in exchange for the obligation to buy four books over the next two years.

Members of the Progressive Book Club will be offered a slate of books each month, reviewed and chosen by a panel that includes the novelists Michael Chabon, Erica Jong and Barbara Kingsolver; John Podesta, president of the Center for American Progress; Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation magazine; and Todd Gitlin, the author and a journalism and sociology professor at Columbia University.

The offerings for June include:

• The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker by Steven Greenhouse (click here for my entries on this book)
• Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It by Elizabeth Royte (click here for my entry on this book)
• Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy by Jeffrey Feldman
• Mudbound, a novel by Hillary Jordan
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver (click here for my entries on this book)
• Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv
• Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy
• Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America by Steven Waldman (click here for my entry on this book)

The club will also offer about 200 older titles such as:

• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• Common Sense by Thomas Paine
• Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
• Oil! by Upton Sinclair
• The End of Nature by Bill McKibben

I doubt I'll join -- I've been trying to limit my book purchases by borrowing books from my local library -- but it seems like it'll be a good place to check for new books.