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.

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.

One, proliferation (and that covers reasons two through 22). Twenty-three, precedent.

What Robin said. There is only one Buffy show. There are millions of books. Literary covers the millions. The book club would cover one.

Proliferation is not always evil. Nor are precedents. Precedents can always be ignored.

I have voted yes to every added thread (movies, literary, music) and then been slightly unhappy with the results as the broadness of the subject does not lend itself to somewhat focused discussion. I think a book club thread may be more of a way to solve the analytic urge cut off at the knees by the end of ALL of our TV shows.

Also I like the way I can skim literary for recs and think that if we put bookclub in their it will lose that ease.

What Robin said. There is only one Buffy show. There are millions of books. Literary covers the millions. The book club would cover one.

Board not called Bookistas, to be blunt.

A book club could handle one book within the confines of an existing thread, probably without doing much, if any, damage to the existing thread, which is slow as treacle when people aren't busy fighting in it.

One, proliferation (and that covers reasons two through 22). Twenty-three, precedent.

And this.