What is Geek Book Club?

 

A book review, and book culture video blog.

 

Mission:

 

  • To get people excited about reading books, whether in printed or digital form
  • To cultivate and engage a vibrant, active, and respectful community of readers
  • To help re-invigorate peer-to-peer recommendations in the book discovering process
  • To prove why it's still rad to read

 

Who is Erick?

 

My name is Erick Kwiecien (pronounced Kwe-chen... it's Polish).

I started making videos about books when I was in elementary school in the mid-90's.  I was given my first video camera, one of the first consumer VHS camcorders ever produced, when I was in fifth grade.  The camera was from the late 70's, which made it already almost 20 years-old when I received it.  It was an enormous, hulking, shoulder-mounted behemoth, with not one, but two computer-like towers attached to it via thick cables.  It was completely immobile, considering that it had no battery, and had to be plugged directly into alternating current to function.  The top-loading VHS deck was in one of the towers (the shoulder-top device needed every square inch to house its raw processing power, hence no room for the tape), and took about three seconds to spool up before it started recording.

I would convince my teachers to allow me to make video projects in lieu of writing lengthy books reports.

I had a life-changing college class in which I had the amazing opportunity to read a book each week, and then meet the author of that book (sometimes over dinner) at week's end.  During this time, I was able to pick the brains of such authors as Khaled Hosseini, and David Means (now my favorite author), among others.

My first gig out of school was answering phones, fetching coffee, and reading screenplays for a prominent 2nd-generation film producer in Los Angeles.  During my time at the small company (three people, including myself), my boss was nominated for a best picture Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine.

I spent the better part of 2009 teaching English in Japan.  Living without a television (my choice, as I couldn't understand Japanese anyway), I rediscovered and was inspired by the incredible web shows that have achieved prominence in recent years.  Series such as La Blogotheque and Vanguard effectively replaced the three-letter-acronym TV networks of my youth, and taught me that internet video is about much more than Keyboard Cats and Star Wars Kids.

Every chapter of my adult life has somehow centered around the importance, power , and magic of narrative and the written word.  I consider it a natural progression that I wound up doing what I do today.  I have always loved reading, whether it be fiction novels, comic books, graphic novels, biographies, or screenplays, etc., and the only thing I hope to accomplish with Geek Book Club is to share my passion for this timeless hobby with as many people as I possibly can.  Maybe I can turn a few people (back) on to reading, and/or introduce the unaware to some of the incredible stories that are out there.