---
id: r-w-book-club
title: R/W Book Club
summary: A Minneapolis-Saint Paul book club meeting since 2003, and the website that keeps the record of everything it has read.
collection: Games and communities
status: active
url: https://rwbookclub.com/
started: 2003-04
topics:
  - reading
  - mediawiki
sources:
  - kind: github
    repository: jthingelstad/rwbookclub.com
    role: implementation
  - kind: website
    url: https://rwbookclub.com/
    role: website
    sitemap: https://rwbookclub.com/sitemap.xml
    feed: https://rwbookclub.com/feed.xml
  - kind: website
    url: https://www.thingelstad.com/projects/book-club/
    role: reference
  - kind: website
    url: https://web.archive.org/web/20120106214958/http://rwbookclub.com/wiki/Main_Page
    role: archive
connections:
  - to: oliver
    label: includes
    detail: Oliver is the book club’s agent and sixth member, sharing the same club database and corpus.
    source: https://rwbookclub.com/oliver/
story:
  color: "#507b68"
  introduction: A long-running reading group, with a shared record.
  engineering:
    - The website presents the club’s reading history and members’ commentary.
    - Public llms.txt and llms-full.txt files make the reading record accessible to agents for analysis.
    - An iCal feed lets members subscribe to the meeting calendar.
    - Oliver, the club’s agent, generates the site from the club database and publishes it to GitHub Pages.
  stack:
    - Static web
    - LLM context files
    - iCalendar
  related:
    - oliver
  questions:
    - How can an agent explore the club’s reading history?
    - How has the book club website evolved?
  source: https://rwbookclub.com/llms.txt
  sourceLabel: Reading history for agents
page: https://thingelstad.xyz/things/r-w-book-club/
---

# R/W Book Club

A Minneapolis-Saint Paul book club meeting since 2003, and the website that keeps the record of everything it has read.

The R/W Book Club is a group of technically minded readers who have met in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area since April 2003. R/W stands for Read / Write: the members read, and many of them also blog. The club reads about eight books a year, mostly nonfiction, and members take turns picking the next book ([About](https://rwbookclub.com/about/)). I built the website, not the club.

I joined in late 2007, when my friend and former professor John Riedl, who started the club, emailed me about “this small book club of geeky guys” he was part of. I “joined without hesitation” and shared the club with John, Tom, Erik and Dan until John died in 2013 ([Goodbye to my friend, John Riedl](https://www.thingelstad.com/2013/07/21/goodbye-to-my.html)).

The club’s record has taken several forms. In early 2011 it was a MediaWiki site called the [Creative Computer Book Club](https://web.archive.org/web/20110323210256/http://creativecomputerbookclub.com/wiki/Main_Page); that July I [hacked on MediaWiki](https://www.thingelstad.com/2011/07/15/i-had-a-blast-hacking.html) with the book club gang, and by January 2012 the same wiki was the [R/W Book Club](https://web.archive.org/web/20120106214958/http://rwbookclub.com/wiki/Main_Page) at rwbookclub.com. In 2017 I built a [Jekyll site](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/17/) at rwbook.club. The club has also kept its record in a shared Airtable database. The current site is generated by [Oliver](https://rwbookclub.com/oliver/), the club’s agent, and offers the reading record as llms.txt files for agents and the meetings as an iCal feed.