Uh-oh. Sean's bringin' in the ferrets. And, also, I agree with the sentiment. There are logical places to split subject matters for discussion - it has worked well here, I think (some feel there is too much fracturing; I'm not of that opinion). In my mind, Book Club is a logical, self-contained, thread-worthy category.

I think Wolfram nails it with, "The purpose of the Book Club Thread is to have a book club." It has nothing to do with Literary issues to me. Could it run in another thread? Well, yeah. But that's not how I think it'll work best, and I'm cheerleading for what I think will work best, not just how it could possibly be doable without changing anything.

(ETA: Oh, and I didn't see Kat's follow-up post where she isn't, in fact, putting the k question on the table again, so never mind my re-answer)

What JZ said. There are people who very much use Literary in its established manner.

What Wolfram said.

But mostly? What Sean said.

(And I actually prefer, am more used to, and love linear boards with everything in one place, but this isn't one.)

Also, would this combining the two involve white fonting, for the sake of those who don't want to see the discussion the club is conducting in Literary? Because if you want to talk about things that get in the way of conversations...

I think having a book club is a good idea. I'm not totally convinced it needs its own thread, but I'm not really strongly against that, either. It really depends on the volume, I think -- if it's going to be a whole lot of posts, then people who want to participate in Lit but not in the book club will have to do a whole lot of scrolling and skimming to find the non-club stuff, which would probably be a pain. On the other hand, if it's not too many, than putting it in its own thread would be kind of pointless. But, I'm pretty sure that, if it is in a dedicated thread, then there will be more posts than there would if it were in Lit. So my arguments are getting all circular, and I'm not totally sure where I stand. Yet. I'll keep reading what everyone else has to say.

I think running the book club in literary would be distracting and difficult, and would probably lead to a reasonably quick fizzling-out of the whole project -- especially if we had to white-font everything, as seems likely.

And Cindy, I also have a 5 percent (okay, maybe more like 15 for me) that would love to diagram the anti-proliferationness of the board -- just put all the threads on the table, hold a vote of confidence for each, and jump up and down on the server until we know exactly how many threads it can support, and how quickly they can move. Then I'd feel like I knew what proliferation meant for the board: Now it feels like we're all groping in the dark.

But that is not the percentage I want making decisions for this board, really.

it's the posters' individual responsibilities to deal with discussions in whatever manner best suits them.

Then why do we bother to have any threads at all, exactly? All discussion should take place in one giant thread, and it's the individual poster's responsibility to ferret out their own discussion?

Yes, absolutely.

No, that's a ridiculous extension to hyperbole and you know it.

We have threads that are based on certain subjects to guide the discussions. We have a Buffy thread to talk about Buffy and related characters and happenings...we do not have a Clem thread for all them Clem fans out there.

So we have a Literary thread to talk about books. We do not need another thread to talk about books.

That doesn't really make any sense to me.

I hope this clears that up.

Reiterating my support for a separate thread. I was in the kerfuffle, and I'm in the wading pool end of lit-crit. The depth of analysis that people are wanting to do with books is intimidating *if it's not something you're used to*. Someone wants to jump in with a "squee!" about Bridget Jones, and they run slap dab into (pulling phrases out of my butt here) discussions on morphology, tautology, the socio-economic impact of British colonialism on modern Indian literature. And so on. I see a lot of people coming to a skidding halt and going, "OK, I was looking for the cocktail bar and ended up in the faculty lounge, I'll just slide on out of here and hope no one noticed me."

(Obligatory "No offense intended" addenda: The Bridget Jones person may well be someone who would like to analyze modern Indian literature--but not just then)

I have to ask though: why this terror at letting it be in its own thread? It's not like we're going to be taking the car on a midnight run to Vegas after stealing the credit cards. We just want to play down and dirty word games.

I have to ask though: why this terror at letting it be in its own thread?

It's not terror. I just think it's pointless is all.

Someone wants to jump in with a "squee!" about Bridget Jones, and they run slap dab into (pulling phrases out of my butt here) discussions on morphology, tautology, the socio-economic impact of British colonialism on modern Indian literature. And so on. I see a lot of people coming to a skidding halt and going, "OK, I was looking for the cocktail bar and ended up in the faculty lounge, I'll just slide on out of here and hope no one noticed me."

Squee and actual content discussions live side by side, hand in glove, blah blah blah in the Comics thread. They always did in the Buffy and Angel threads. I think it's an artificial distinction to separate them. Lord knows, I don't when I'm in the middle of them.

Plus, of course, what Amych and MM have said.

No, that's a ridiculous extension to hyperbole and you know it.

It was extention to hyperbole, but to illustrate the seeming arbitrariness of your argument, which from what I can tell boils down to "of course we need seperate threads for topics of dicussion, except where we don't."

I hope this clears that up.

It clears up where you have decided to draw the line, but it still seems arbitrary to me.

But Buffy and Angel threads are exactly what the Book Club thread would be like, it seems to me. Why did we separate Buffy from Angel (from Firefly)? It was so people could really concentrate discussion on each show. The book club would be like the show threads, one hopes, where everyone there is only interested in talking about this one thing, and that concentration leads to some interesting insights. I like the atmosphere in the Lit thread as it is now, with people recommending books and sharing book histories. The all-over-the-placeness of it is part of its charm.