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.

All discussion should take place in one giant thread

t old-timer I remember back on TT, when there was only one thread, and it was a Buffy thread. Really. Buffistas confined themselves to one thread. And then it grew.... t /old-timer

I'm pretty neutral on the Book Club thread, but more like neutral-fine-with-it, rather than neutral-please-not-another-thread.

I don't know if I would participate in it, but it's no big if there's one more existing thread that I don't participate in. I participate in Movies but not LOTR, but LOTR's existence doesn't bother me.

On the other hand, I totally get Plei's comparison to the comics thread, but I think the Book Club thread would be higher posting volume than comics currently is. Right now Comics is a small band of freaks, but if it got way bigger, possibly all the Green Arrow discussion that would burst forth exuberantly would drive me nuts. I don't really know.

If the Book Club participants are many and chatty (hell, we're Buffistas; we are therefore chatty), then I think a separate thread would be fine.

It seems sort of like a show thread and the quotables thread for that show. There's utterly no reason that quotes couldn't have been posted in the show thread. But they managed to get their own threads anyway.

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.

All the ME shows. There are still plenty of us watching other shows, which then get whitefont discussion in Natter.

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.

I think there's a false assumption that Bookclub would generate a mass of traffic akin to showday and post episode watch and posts. A slow, but steady, influx of commentary seems the more likely possibility.

Or what Scrappy (I mean Robin) said...

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

Me, neither. Ya wanna borrow my sledge hammer?

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

Of course it's arbitrary. Everything on this board is arbitrary to an extent.

Look, LoTR discussions threatened to swamp Natter...so we have a thread for that. Music discussions threatened to swamp Natter, or so some would have you believe...and we have a separate thread for that.

But no "discussion" is threatening to swamp Literary. The argument seems to be "We *want* to have discussion". So go ahead. Or the argument is "We don't want to disrupt Lit". Well how do we know you will? You haven't managed to have a discussion.

Ultimately, like most thread proposals, we will come to a vote and I will shrug no matter the outcome. But none of the arguments for this proposal make sense to me.

To put it bluntly...if you can't manage to coordinate a discussion about one book in the book thread, I see that as a failure of the poster, not the thread itself. If we want to pander to that, fine.

All the ME shows. There are still plenty of us watching other shows, which then get whitefont discussion in Natter.

Yes. I hate that. I can't find the discussion!

I totally get Plei's comparison to the comics thread, but I think the Book Club thread would be higher posting volume than comics currently is. Right now Comics is a small band of freaks, but if it got way bigger, possibly all the Green Arrow discussion that would burst forth exuberantly would drive me nuts. I don't really know.

I don't.

I can read three comics with reasonable depth of reading within half an hour and then yammer about 'em. Books, they take longer. And I don't really see that we'd have more people talking about books than we do comics. Top of my head, there's a good baker's dozen regular posters in the J-verse thread.

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.

And again, I can only say that the impression I got from the regular posters in Literary was that it's very much a real and un-artificial distinction to them, that many of the people who have given the thread the cozy, ramshackle atmosphere Robin describes regard critical discussion as hostile, as something that would turn the thread that they've invested time and energy in into a place where they feel belittled and talked over and like they have no voice and no place.

I want a Buffista book club, but I don't want it so badly that I'm willing to make these people feel like second-class citizens in what is, by seniority and participation level, kinda their own thread. I'd much, much rather have a separate thread.