I recently received the 2013 Politics and International Relations catalog from Princeton University Press, and as I perused the book titles I found myself saying things like “I want to read that,” “That looks interesting,” and “Ooohhhhh.”  Once I was done having my nerd moment, I thought about how cool it might be to have a book club via my blog based on some of the books that I wanted to read from the catalog.  I thought it would be an awesome opportunity to read and discuss these books with people from across the US and around the globe.  Plus, it’s kind of a cool experiment if you think about it.  So, it is with great pleasure (and a lot of hope that this project succeeds) that I invite people from all over to read one book per month for a year, beginning in October.

My idea is to read the book during the first three weeks of the month and then spend the last week of the month discussing it here on the blog.  I will write the initial post with my thoughts and hope that somebody else has also read the book and wants to discuss their thoughts as well.  If anybody would like to be a guest facilitator and write the initial post for any of the books, please feel free to let me know, and we’ll figure out how to make that happen.  Finally, I will also try to contact the author(s) of the books to see if they would like to participate in this project.

The schedule is as follows:
October–Keohane, Nannerl O.  Thinking about Leadership.
November–Norton, Anne.  On the Muslim Question.
December–Bartels, Larry M.  Unequal Democracy.
January–Borstelmann, Thomas.  The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality.
February–Mazower, Mark.  No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations.
March–Neier, Aryeh.  The International Human Rights Movement.
April–Marquand, David.  The End of the West: The Once and Future Europe.
May–Trachtenberg, Marc.  The Cold War and After: History, Theory, and the Logic of International Politics.
June–Steil, Benn.  The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order.
July–Wickham, Carrie Rosefsky.  The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement.
August–Beerbohm, Eric.  In Our Name: The Ethics of Democracy.
September–Hall, John A.  The Importance of Being Civil: The Struggle for Political Decency.

Finally, a note on how I chose the titles.  First, I picked ones in the catalog that sounded interesting to me.  Second, I narrowed those down into books that hopefully appeal to more than just American readers; after all, I’m trying to get a global discussion going here.  Third, the only method for the order of the books is that I put them in the order they appeared in the catalog.  Fourth, I know that there are a lot of publishers out there, but I just happened to have the catalog from Princeton University Press (PUP) at this particular moment in time, so I rolled with it.  I am in no way associated with PUP, nor am I receiving any sort of payment from them.

If you plan on participating in the book club, or have questions, please feel free to leave a comment.

Thanks for reading.