ITA with MM. And I too was curious about the question Jessica brought up and withdrew.

I thought Jessica's question was answered. Did I misunderstand the withdrawal?

Okay, but...I guess my question still applies. I mean...you read Z book and loved it. You wanna talk about it. A and B are talking about X book. What's stopping you from popping in, saying "Anybody else read Z? LOVED IT!" so that Person D can say "Yo! I read Z and I loved it up until the demon-monkeys ate the frog princess and then I was all 'Shah! Whatev!'" while A and B continue talking about X?

MM, the point of book club is not so Person A and B can continue their discussion on Book X, obviously they can talk about Book X until there's nobody who wants to talk about it anymore. It's so Persons C-Z can participate in A and B's discussion of Book X with both the time to read Book X beforehand, and then have more then a couple hours to respond to Book X discussion before A and B are either gone or off discussing Book Y.

When we treat these threads like chat rooms things seem a lot easier then when we treat them like posting boards. It's a lot harder to maintain discussion on one particular text when only one other person has read the text or is interested in discussing it, and that person may only log on in the mornings while you are the afternoon owl. It's a whole different thing when a number of people pop in and out to discuss the same text (like in show threads.)

MM is me, here.

MM, I think one of the attractive bits for people is that you'd have an entire thread where everyone is discussing the same text, rather than just a few people. Something like a replacement for the episode analysis that always happened while/after something aired. But the only time that a significant number of people are reading the same thing at the same time is when a new Harry Potter comes out, so there isn't a lot of opportunity for it. A Buffista Book Club would encourage people to have a common text to pick apart which they had read recently enough to remember it well, giving an outlet for focused discussion.

At least that's my sense of the thing.

And I too was curious about the question Jessica brought up and withdrew.

You don't consider it to have been answered? (Serious question - Jess asked "is it A or B," at least two or three people said "neither." If there are people who don't agree with that answer, by all means speak up. But I did sort of think the question had been addressed.

A and B are talking about X book. What's stopping you from popping in, saying "Anybody else read Z? LOVED IT!" so that Person D can say "Yo! I read Z and I loved it up until the demon-monkeys ate the frog princess and then I was all 'Shah! Whatev!'"

Well, it's been fairly well kerfuffed that something is stopping us. Whether it's occasional in-thread resistance, or the dimness of memory making people not want to get too in depth without going back and taking another look, or just the pace or structure of the thread, well, who knows. What we do know is that a number of people do not feel like that particular thread is a fertile environment, and this is a partial attempt to address that.

Wolfram, I'm still not seeing why you can't set that up in Lit. If one person is a morning poster and the other is an afternoon poster, being in a different thread isn't going to change that. Adding another thread isn't going to increase the time to read a given book or facilitate Persons C-Z discussion of said book if they've read it. So far, this Book Club thread just sounds like a recommendation to read a book with deadlines. Nothing about that needs a whole new thread.

I'm anti-prolif, and still unclear on why the current lit thread-- unsatisfying because of the lack of discussion focus-- is inhospitable to focusing. Why is it a problem that everyone talks about one book at once? What is the likelihood that there will be a lot of "noise" if there are lots of people reading the same book? Like a show thread, it can discuss both the current book and books in general. To sum up, I don't see what will be disturbed by attempting book club in Literary.

Some of the proliferation concerns seem remote because we have a dedicated server, however temporarily, and no foreseeable population explosions. But there is still the concern of the slippery slope of simply adding threads unjustifiably and grandfathering those threads in. Separating discussions is one thing-- creating an LotR thread to keep it from derailing natter-- but creating them of whole cloth when we feel like it is kind of a bad precedent to set.

There's nothing stopping you from finding people who have read Z or telling somebody "Dude! Z! Read it, it rocks!" and getting people to read it and talk about it in Lit rather than starting a whole new thread.

People do suggest that people read what they like, it just never turns into discussion because 12 other people are suggesting what they like. Which is good. If I'm about to go to the bookstore I can hunt back through Literary for stuff I might like, but by the time I've had a chance to buy it and read it, and come back to talk about it, it's been a while. So I say- I just read whateverthebookwas! By then there are new recs, not a lot of discussion.

I guess the question is: would incorporating a Book Club into Literary derail Literary's current function?

I'm not sure that we couldn't do it in that thread. I would worry that the people who have no interest in reading whatever we've chosen would get bored looking for reccomendations or info on the latest Harry Potter (assuming that's not what we were reading) and feel they'd been pushed out of a thread they enjoyed.

Separating discussions is one thing-- creating an LotR thread to keep it from derailing natter-- but creating them of whole cloth when we feel like it is kind of a bad precedent to set.

Is this really so different, though? I mean, for me the biggest argument in favor is that I think the separation will improve the discussion - but the flip side to the argument is exactly to keep it from derailing the Lit thread as it has developed.