CH Projects x San Diego Magazine Book Club is back, and mutated. Our life goal now: indie bookstores and good, old-fashioned bribery.
SDM’s gonna tell the stories of our city’s indie bookstores. Those fantastic culture beasts. And CH Projects will dole out bribes for you to walk into one of them, browse your brains out, and buy something from a well-read neighbor. Nothing against online supermega retailers and their one-click seducery. We just think local bookstores should be obsessively supported and exalted.
Please visit one of the participating local, indie bookshops listed below. Keep your receipt, snap a photo, and email it to us at [email protected].
We’ll randomly select one member every three months to win a $200 gift card to Craft & Commerce.
Don’t matter if your vice is literary nonfiction or eyelid-sweat romance smut. All books are equal under the eyes of the bribe.
Support indie bookstores. Our holy word churches. Join the club.
Join us for our inaugural Book Club where we'll read, discuss and mull over the books that have shaped our lives—all while supporting our local shops
CH + SDM Book Club
Books are Airbnbs for your brain.
Thanks for wanting to join our literary side hustle: the CH Projects and San Diego Magazine Book Club. It’s a clunky name, but it’s ours.
We created this club because we believe in the regenerative power of independent bookstores. And the power of a well-chosen cluster of words to shift whole lives. The club will be based around the books that shaped our own.
To join this sexy book club, enter your information in the form below. As esteemed members, you’ll be the first to know each month’s selected book. Expect to receive an email soon announcing the October book.
We also announce each month’s pick in San Diego Magazine. We encourage you to subscribe (this is also a scheme to support local media and creatives).
Please visit one of the participating local, indie bookshops listed below to get your copy. Keep your receipt, snap a photo, and email it to us at [email protected].
We’ll randomly select one member each month to win $300 to any Consortium Holdings Projects establishment (Born & Raised, Neighborhood, Polite Provisions, Ironside, Craft & Commerce, Part Time Lover, Fortunate Son, etc.).
More details to come.
A sincere thank you,
Consortium Holdings Project & San Diego Magazine
Enter your information below to sign-up for the CH x SDM Book Club
The Pulitzer-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan, joined SDM content chief Troy Johnson for an IG Live to talk about her award-winning novel, which kicked off the CH + SDM Book Club.
We’re kind of geeked.
When we started this book club with Consortium Holdings Projects, we were just two companies with a shared affinity for books that have the power to shape lives. Now, we’re 1,000+ members strong, breaking down a novel’s themes with the author herself.
Jennifer Egan does not like to go backwards in time. She likes to go forward and she has been gracious enough to go backwards 10 years to A Visit From the Goon Squad, which was her amazing, visceral, beautiful book. She’s written a ton.
In fact, she just released a new one, The Candy House, which Obama said was one of his favorite reads of the summer. Watch the full conversation above, or read the condensed transcript below, which highlights some of our favorite moments.
Chief Content Officer, Troy Johnson (TJ):
I wouldn’t say that [Goon Squad] is a rage against the machine, but you show a little trepidation about the machine. And social media…
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Jennifer Egan (JE):
I’m kind of an incompetent machine. I think about a new device and I think how long will it take me to be able to use it and how much will I screw it up? But I have nothing inherently against any of it.
TJ:
I was reading about your process of writing, which is fascinating and a bit luddite too.You write everything out by hand?
JE:
I write by hand for fiction [because] fiction requires a connection with my unconscious, with the part of me that is not thinking and not critiquing the part of me that in some ways can surprise myself and handwriting. And by that I really mean cursive because printing doesn’t do it. But cursive seems to activate that part of my brain, and it has some additional advantages. I can’t really read it very well because my writing is appalling. And so again, I don’t have that urge that I think we all have when we look at a screen to like back up and make it better, I can’t do that. And it seems that I get into a less thought driven state of mind in which I can enact a kind of improvisation on the page. And that’s what leads to my best material.
TJ:
Athletes get that way… performers get that way … they talk about it being a flow. Where you’re so engrossed and you don’t have the backspace button, the only way through it is forward, right?
JE:
Absolutely. And what you said about the only way forward is actually really important because I don’t do much editing at all as I write. Most importantly, I don’t read over what I’ve written until the next day, and I do that basically just to reenter that flow.
TJ:
In [the first couple pages of] Goon Squad, Sasha is staring at a purse, which is sitting on the floor in a bathroom… and she’s listening to somebody pee. It’s so imperfectly human… How do you come up with those first [scenes] and how do you know when you found them?
JE:
For me, starting with a physical environment is a crucial part of the process because I want to sort of be in a sensory environment [or] space where someone is observing sensory details of a physical environment. Then the question is, who is making these observations? Who is perceiving the woman peeing or anything else that is the beginning of a character? And then what does that person do or who else is there? And now we have the beginning of more characters and action.
In that particular case… there was a corollary from my own life, which is that I was in a hotel bathroom; I did see a wallet. And what it evoked for me was one of too many memories of having actually been robbed. I saw that wallet and I thought, Oh my God, someone’s gonna take it. And then I thought, Well, I’m the only one here. I’m obviously not gonna take it. But in general, I don’t write about my own life. And what I’m most curious about is a point of view opposed to mine. So if I’ve been robbed… what’s it like to be the one who steals the wallet and my curiosity was provoked.
TJ:
It seems to me you love imperfection [and] fallibility of humanity. Every character lives with myriad flaws in Goon Squad yet they’re not unlovable… you have so much compassion for them.
Troy Johnson is the magazine’s award-winning food writer and humorist, and a long-standing expert on Food Network. His work has been featured on NatGeo, Travel Channel, NPR, and in Food Matters, a textbook of the best American food writing.
The Best Gym in San Diego Isn’t Really a Gym Anymore
Earlier this year, Fit quietly dropped "athletic" from its brand, from Fit Athletic Clubs to simply Fit, and started calling itself something new: a social wellness club.
There’s a version of San Diego that lives in two extremes. On one side, the 5 a.m. crowd: biohackers, marathoners, people who’ve already logged a cold plunge before your alarm goes off. On the other, the after-dark crowd, the ones chasing sunset happy hours and late dinners with friends. Everyone seems to be either optimizing or unwinding, and most of us feel like we’re failing at both.
Fit, San Diego’s reigning Best Gym for the third year running, has built its entire identity around erasing that divide.
Walk into one of Fit’s three San Diego locations on a Tuesday afternoon and the lines blur fast. Someone’s mid-set on the squat rack. Someone else has a laptop open at a café table a few feet away, half-working, half-people-watching. A group is trading plans for the weekend’s event by the recovery lounge. Nobody’s in a rush to leave.
“We’re not competing for the same people,” says Emily Waybright, Public Relations Manager at Fit, addressing the arrival of a national luxury gym chain in San Diego this year. “We don’t really feel like we’re in the gym category. It’s this unique thing.”
That unique thing has a name now. Earlier this year, Fit quietly dropped “athletic” from its brand, from Fit Athletic Clubs to simply Fit, and started calling itself something new: a social wellness club.
It’s a small wording change with a bigger idea behind it. Fit was never built around escaping the workday. It was built around the people who genuinely like what they do, and who want workouts, work, and friendships to happen in the same place instead of three separate ones. Because sometimes red light therapy with a stranger turns into weekend plans.
Fit’s philosophy traces back to its founder, who started the brand nearly two decades ago after failing to find a gym he actually wanted to belong to. He looked instead to the old-school country club, where people came for a shared interest and stayed for the community. His version was made for a younger generation, minus the golf, plus the loud music.
Which makes it a little ironic that the very award putting Fit back in the spotlight this year is Best Gym.
What does the best traditional gym look like when the definition of a gym is becoming less traditional? It’s a fair question, and Fit’s answer is that the fitness industry itself is shifting. The 45-minutes-in, 45-minutes-out model is giving way to something closer to a genuine third space, the kind of role the office and the bar used to play before remote work and changing nightlife habits rearranged how people spend their time
For Fit, community isn’t a marketing add-on to fitness. It’s the through-line. Members aren’t just paying for a treadmill; they’re paying for an entire day of social wellness that’s built on performance, recovery, connection, and a plan for the next event on the calendar. That’s a much harder membership to walk away from.
Ambition and ease aren’t opposites here, they exist side by side, where passion and play share the same morning. On September 12, Fit is hosting Sol, a full day wellness festival at Fit Social. The morning focuses on wellness classes and vendors and then the evening is a full party with multiple DJ sets and an open bar. Think of it as a kick-off to locals’ summer in San Diego.
Ready to see what a social wellness club actually looks like? Visit fitclubs.com, or follow along at @thefitclubs on Instagram.
Growing up, Laika Nur, MD, Scripps Clinic sports medicine specialist, loved watching beach volleyball when the Association of Volleyball Professionals tour came to her hometown of Chicago. A talented volleyball player herself, she remembers sitting in the stands all day, and once, even got a couple autographs. Years later, Dr. Nur was attending a professional event focused on women’s sports, and the discussion turned to a new professional women’s volleyball league. The general manager and coaching staff for San Diego’s team, the Mojo, happened to be in attendance, and Dr. Nur took the opportunity to ask them if they needed a team doctor. Flash forward to the Mojo’s inaugural 2024 season, when Dr. Nur officially became the team physician. Click here to read more about Dr. Nur and how she incorporates lessons she learned on the court into her practice.
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