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u/BrettWilcox Feb 14 '10 edited Feb 14 '10
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
This would be a good book seeing as the movie is coming out next month!
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u/chunkyblow Feb 15 '10
Anything by H.P. Lovecraft.
It has been far too long since I have read these works.
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Feb 15 '10
[deleted]
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u/mormagli Feb 20 '10
you want to kill the baby in the womb, huh?
don't get me wrong, it's a great book, but maybe we should hold off a bit before we hit the heavy shit.
... then again, you didn't say V - that one had me depressed for a month. I was nonfunctional untill I blew through a couple of hamilton's crappy genre books.
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u/cr4a Feb 17 '10
I'm crossposting this from the books subreddit discussion:
Hi all, coming to this a bit late. I'm the creator of the original /r/bookclub subreddit.
That club started out real strong (probably since it was the first), but quickly dwindled until by the end I was getting only a few responses and no discussion whatsoever.
My model ended up being this:
- post a suggestions topic and leave it open for a week or so
- take the top-upvoted (ignoring downvotes) suggestions (or lacking any suggestions, pick a couple topical books) and post announcements about them
- give a month or so to read the books (less for short ones, more for long ones)
- post discussion topic along with the next book announcements
Some thoughts about improvements:
- a month is a good amount of time for reading (it was originally a week)
- open the discussion thread immediately and leave it open all month; also link it from the main subreddit page
- offer a variety of books for the month, at least one of which is free
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u/imalive Feb 17 '10
I suggest posting three topics per book:
- Before reading: Suggestions for Background Reading & Related material
- While you read: with a list of chapters as comments: then the members could come here while they read the book, share their thoughts, quotes they liked and not be afraid of spoilers. The comments for the chapters they didn't read yet they could collapse and disregard.
- Final discussion: more general terms, maybe some criticism
This will create some interest between the start and the deadline.
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u/FoffT Feb 18 '10 edited Feb 18 '10
Along the same lines as your first point, Related Material can (and should) include more recent books, movies, music or games that draw upon the book as inspiration. That way, people might see that the book we're reading was the original inspiration for a movie or series they like and get roped in.
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u/imalive Feb 18 '10
Good idea! So how about reading three books a month (as cr4a suggested having a few to choose from, or read all if time permits, a month is a long time)
- Classic available online
- Contemporary fiction
- Maybe some popular science/travel/history...?
The absolute ideal would be if the three books are somehow related, but I doubt it's plausible.
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u/FoffT Feb 19 '10
I wouldn't mind 2 at a time: one that's free online and one to pick up cheap so I have something new to read between classes.
Plus, it would let people actually choose the book they wanted to read instead of being forced into a book they have no interest in. I do think that any more than 2 would fragment the discussion too much.
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Feb 20 '10 edited Feb 20 '10
[deleted]
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u/BrettWilcox Feb 20 '10
I am a bit late coming around to reading this but I really like this idea as well.
So my suggestions would be
- Have a Project Gutenberg book of the month that the community decides on.
- Pick any book you want to read of the month and we could pick a theme. Go with Sci-Fi or Mystery etc...
The problem when you start combining books is the voting. We don't want people to add two different titles to the same post for people to vote on, so we will have to create 2 separate posts. I just don't want to confuse people.
I have installed a greasemonkey script so I can see what post has the most up votes.
What are every ones thoughts?
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u/mormagli Feb 14 '10
I'm in.
are we recommending books we want to read or that we've read and think would work well in this context?
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u/imalive Feb 14 '10
You want to read, or you've read and you're willing to reread and/or discuss.
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u/mormagli Feb 14 '10
ok, how about the crying of lot 49 by thomas pynchon? I've read it seve n or eight times, but love talking about it so...
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u/imalive Feb 15 '10
Could you edit the original post to include a suggestion by BrettWilcox about the texts being available online?
Moreover, I propose that once we get down to picking the books to read we should look at upvotes only (visible with some reddit scripts) - this way it will be fair to people who just upvoted what they liked, and left the other suggestions alone. (both downvoting everything else and upvoting your submission is like having a double say)
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u/BrettWilcox Feb 14 '10
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u/mormagli Feb 14 '10
despite being a must read in my book, I'm not sure how condusive it is to dicussion in terms of literary merit.
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u/BrettWilcox Feb 14 '10 edited Feb 14 '10
On further thought, should we stick to just Project Gutenberg so the most people can join in if they want? I think there is a whole host of books out there that can be read that we can vote on, and it would be more in the spirit of the reddit community.
We do not have to necessarily downvote suggestions, a lot of people will come in and just vote up what they like in the comments.