Thursday, January 8, 2009

Calling All Brainiacs



Our good friend, Chile at Chile Chews, alerted us to an uber cool Science-Book Challenge. As there are a ton of books that are both "ecologically relevant" and science books, we thought we'd give all you bookworms a heads up.

The rules for the Science Book Challenge are as follows:

1) Read at least three nonfiction books in 2009 related somehow to the theme "Nature's Wonders". Your books should have something to do with science, scientists, how science operates, or science's relationship with its surrounding culture. Your books might be popularizations of science, they might be histories, they might be biographies, they might be anthologies; they can be recent titles or older books. We take a very broad view of what makes for interesting and informative science reading.

2) After you've read a book, write a short note about it, giving your opinion of the book. What goes in the note? The things you would tell a friend if you wanted to convince your friend to read it--or avoid it. Naturally, you can read some of the existing Book Notes for ideas. You might like to read our Book-note ratings for ideas about how to evaluate your books.

3) Don't worry if you find that you've read a book someone else has also read; we welcome multiple notes on one title.

4) Get your book note to us and we'll post it with the other notes in our Book Note section. Use the book-note form or the comment form to get in touch with us.

5) Tell other people about the Science-Book Challenge:
http://ArsHermeneutica.org/besieged/Science-Book_Challenge_2009.

So if you are interested in eco-books with a science bent, wiggle on over and sign up. If you would like to cross-post your reviews on The Blogging Bookworm as well, please give me a shout at greenbeandreams(AT)gmail(DOT)com.

Happy non-fiction reading.

5 comments:

Joyce said...

This is a great idea! There should be a lot of crossover between the green reads and the science subjects. Also, I think it is good for green readers to be careful to read well researched material, and not just things that are popular opinion.

Chile said...

Thanks for posting about it, Green Bean. I'm going to use the challenge as a push to read the books I have on my own bookshelves. You know, the ones I bought because they are full of great information but I just haven't gotten around to reading!

Farmer's Daughter said...

Do the textbooks I read for my classes count? Or is that cheating???

Thanks for the info!

Anonymous said...

Green Bean, thanks so much for publicizing the book challenge. I'm doing the hosting gig at Ars Hermeneutica and we've been getting a great response for this year's challenge.

As Joyce said there should be a great deal of crossover between green titles and great science -- ideally, all of them because, as Joyce emphasizes, I'd like to think that authors writing on environmental topics are going to have a more accurate scientific perspective (certainly compared to anti-environmentalists).

On the question of textbooks...it depends, I'd say. Books written with the classroom in mind maybe not so much, but more popular books that might get used in the classroom, of course.

btw, if people would like to sign up at the official page by following the link you give, I'll add their names and blog link to the list of challengers, which I hope helps encourage others.

Going Crunchy said...

Lovin' this one!