SED#00: A New Book Club Podcast for Regular People
Scholé Sisters is starting a new podcast—because apparently one podcast wasn’t enough!
This time, we’re inviting you straight into our book club as we take turns choosing books, leading conversations, asking too many questions, and occasionally disagreeing.
In this kickoff episode, we explain why we believe reading together is worth the effort, how surprisingly simple it can be to start a book club of your own, and what you can expect from this new project—including the first three books on our list.
[XX] We’re starting another podcast to encourage you to start a local book club!
[XX] Reading with friends, rather than alone, is more valuable
[XX] Our guidelines for this podcast book club
[XX] New podcast format
[XX] First few books we’ll read and discuss
The Scholé Sisters:
Brandy Vencel ends up being in charge even though she doesn’t want to be
Mystie Winckler ends up being in charge because somebody has to do it
Abby Wahl ends up being in charge because of her infectious enthusiasm
Why start a book club?
Friendship is an obstetric art. It draws out our richest and deepest resources. It unfolds the wings of our dreams and hidden, indeterminate thoughts. It serves as a check on our judgments, tries out our new ideas, keeps up our ardor, and inflames our enthusiasm. Try, if you can, to join some such group. Try, if need be, to establish one.
A.G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual life, 56-57
Why start another podcast?
We want to encourage more women to start local book clubs, and we want to demonstrate how low pressure and non-intimidating it can be to just have a bookish conversation. You don’t need to be an expert in something or ha- or show up with some lesson to lead a book group.
You can read a book and talk about it and have fun and grow in your education together no matter where you’re all starting from.
Why you need a book club
Reading on your own can be fruitful, but it is easy to mistake a strong impression for genuine understanding. The moment you try to explain an idea to someone else, you discover what you have actually learned—and where your thinking is still fuzzy.
A book club helps ideas become clearer and more firmly rooted through questions, disagreement, and the connections other readers notice. Everyone brings different experiences and perspectives, making the conversation richer than anything one reader could produce alone.
Book clubs also make friendship easier and deeper. Instead of waiting for casual conversation to move beyond small talk, a shared book gives everyone something substantial to gather around.
You get to know people through the questions they ask, the passages that strike them, and the opinions they bring to the discussion.
Add the accountability to keep reading and finish worthwhile books, and a book club becomes more than a pleasant gathering: it becomes a practical way to grow in wisdom, education, and friendship.
How this new podcast will go
In this new podcast, we’re inviting you to listen in on a real book club among the three of us. We’ll take turns choosing a book and leading the conversation, so each episode will look a little different depending on who is in charge.
We’re not showing up as experts delivering lectures; we’re reading carefully, asking questions, comparing perspectives, and working through worthwhile ideas together. Our hope is both to give you a richer understanding of each book and to demonstrate how relaxed and accessible a good bookish conversation can be.
We’ll read across five categories—history, theology, philosophy, zeitgeist, and family—finishing one book in each category before beginning the cycle again. Each book will receive three to six episodes, with readings divided into manageable portions and episodes released every other week.
We’re beginning with C. S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism, followed by Johann Kurtz’s Leaving a Legacy and David Gibson’s Living Life Backwards. You can read along with us, use the conversations to enrich your own book club, or simply pull up a chair and join ours.
Scholé Sisters is committed to equipping homeschool moms with intellectual courage and increasing the number of thinking Christian women (homeschoolers…
