Jeff Howe’s One Book, One Twitter Experiment
The man who fathered the word “Crowdsourcing” has a very interesting experiment going on.
It starts with the tagline: “What If Everyone on Twitter Read One Book?”, and follows with “What if everyone on Twitter read the same book at the same time and we formed one massive, international book club?”.
That’s the premise of this experiment, with inspiration in city-wide simillar programs that happened in Seattle and Chicago (amongst others), and on the notion of Social Capital plus the thought that “Twitter would provide a much better platform for a book club than the mere accident of physical proximity”.
So for the last few weeks, there’s been a nominations fase, and now we’ve reached a selection fase: 6 books were chosen from the nominations from people all over the world, along with other 4 books selected by the One Book, One Twitter board.
And now, everybody can vote on those 10 to select the winner. Here are the nominees:
The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. 352 pps.
Mangos are pickled, and hope is too, in Roy’s quirky, brutal, Booker-award-winning novel about two young twins, a lonely mother, and an untouchable with beautiful hands.
Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison. 337 pps.
Macon “Milkman” Dead III has been known as a momma’s boy ever since he was a kid. Now he has to figure out who he really is while avoiding the two people who want him dead. Nobel Prize winner, 1993.
Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. 288 pps.
Extraterrestrial adventures on the planet Tralfamadore meet the WWII fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, in this cult classic about an optometrist who becomes “unstuck in time.”
1984, by George Orwell. 326 pps.
George Orwell’s nightmarish vision of a totalitarian state. Prescient, controversial, brilliant, 1984 invented both “doublethink” and “Big Brother.”
Brave New World, by Aldus Huxley. 288 pps.
Come for the drugs (Mmmmm … Soma), stay for the “feelies”—movies that touch all the senses. The Modern Library ranked Huxley’s 1932 novel fifth in its list of the 100 best novels of the 20th Century.
100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez. 432 pps.
Published in 1967 and translated into over 100 languages, Marquez’s magnum opus was not only lauded as a crowning achievement in magical realism by critics, but also became the best selling Spanish language book in modern history, after Don Quixote.
American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. 480 pps.
Don’t call it science fiction. Gaiman’s Hugo- and Nebula-award winning novel is “a scary, strange, and hallucinogenic road trip wrapped around a deep examination of the American spirit.”
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. 453 pps.
Published in 1961, Catch-22 was the original indictment of the absurdism of war, and the army, and bureaucracy in general.
Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger. 276 pps.
Without Holden Caulfield, angst would just be another German word for anguish.
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. 201 pps.
Tired of all those dystopias? Try this dystopia! Bradbury envisions “a hedonistic anti-intellectual America that has completely abandoned self-control,” in which “firemen” extinguish any flicker of an intellectual life
At this moment, American Gods is winning by a long stretch.
After the voting ends and a book is chosen, everybudy will get to read it over the summer and discuss it on twitter.
We end this post with Jeff’s own words again, on the ultimate goal of this experiment: “The point of this (to the extent it has a point beyond good fun with a good book) is to create community across geographical, cultural, ethnic, economic and social boundaries.”
So get to Wired and vote on your favorite!
For more updates, follow Jeff Howe’s twitter @crowdsourcing and the hashtag #1b1t.