What do you guys think of having a "book club" for the LOTR trilogy? We'd assign a different chapter to different people. Then we read a chapter over the weekend and then whoever's turn it is leads a discussion, poses questions, etc. over the chapter we just read. The discussion would go on through the week and end on Friday or Saturday, at which point we'd read the next chapter, and so on. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Sounds good to me as I feel it is time I read it anew. I read it only once before in English. Might be difficult for me to lead a discussion though, because of the bad habit of answering my own questions... Should get rid of it somehow. And also if time and circumstance permit.
This was Teralectus' idea...it should be his baby....but we could come up with some sort of game plan and thank you Laurelin for volunteering for Chapter 1....LOL.
I'll start with the first chapter. Then whoever goes next will have a general idea of the structure, but feel free to be creative. I'll start the first post tomorrow and we'll discuss the first chapter this week, but if not everyone has a chance to read it by the weekend, we'll extend this chapter's discussion.
My idea was to start a new thread each week for each chapter. I don't think one thread a week would be spam. That way if anyone wanted to go back and look at past discussions it would be much easier than scrolling through pages and pages of this thread. Anyone object?
I think a forum mentor person (what are they called again?) would have to do this. But, what if there was an overall thing in the forums called Book Club and then under each of that we could have a thread for a chapter.
Well administrators can move threads/posts, right? So we'll just start it ourselves and if they want to create a separate sub-category for the club they can relocate our threads there.
To talk to an administrator simply send a private message to The One (or Lady Arwen could also be helpful). My experience has been a response in less than 24hrs.
For setting up your thread like this you don't need an administrator ... Just continue from right where you are ...
So are we reading;
Prologue
1. Concerning Hobbits
2. Concerning Pipe-weed
3. Of the Ordering of the Shire
4. Of the Finding of the Ring
5. Note on the Shire Records
????????
-- Edited by Bear on Wednesday 26th of February 2014 05:10:32 AM
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Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit Called or uncalled, God is present
I think that's what Teralectus (our leader in this Club) has proposed. Someone has to volunteer to lead the discussion on Chapter 2 though. I would but I will be out of country this week and may not have internet readily available.
Hi Teralectus (Interesting Roman name) A new thread for the same think is not a good idea. I hate to step in here as a Moderator,but along with the "fun" things, I also have to do not so fun things like my current suggestion. I hope you understand.
We already have volumes of OLD Archives that slow the site down. So please keep it to one discussion thread and just write "Chapter ONE Discussion" , "Chapter TWO Discussion" and so one.
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Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo! Ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow! Tom Bom, Jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!
Lady Arwen - Can you start one new topic that will hold all the posts for future discussions and just name it something like "The Lord of the Rings Book Club", and then Lorelline can make the first post, something to the effect of "CHAPTER 2: SHADOW OF THE PAST" and post his questions under that thread? (I think it would be good for the discussion leader to post the title of each new chapter in all caps to make it easier to find the breaks between chapter discussions if someone ever wants to go back and look at old posts).
If we post all this book discussion stuff on one thread will we have to sift through pages and pages of material to find our places? Say if we wish to add to a discussion on chapter 3 when we are all on chapter 6? How does that work......?
I totally agree with JD7. We will likely have afterthoughts on previous chapters, and the discussion may become hardly manageable. My impression is the problem cannot be addressed by searching, as this site only does a search by thread, not by post. In my opinion, how Teralectus has started it was a good and clear way. If anything, I would rather collapse the introduction sections, both of them, into just one thread. There you can at least look up by date someone has joined the site.
I see points with Lady Arwen & Teralectus AND Lorelline & Jaido. How much effort would it take to type all caps "CHAPTER 2: SHADOW OF THE PAST" or even to color code. Say the moderator topics for a Chapter are all red and the responses all white. It will be easier to find stuff that way.
Teralectus suggestion "Can you start one new topic that will hold all the posts for future discussions and just name it something like "The Lord of the Rings Book Club" seems most accommodating. And if we put at the start of each post the chapter we are discussing that will make it a little easier to find and still follow Arwen's suggestion. If not and we choose to seek another solution ... we must move cautiously but firmly.
It would be easier to start a new thread for each chapter ... but what I hear Arwen saying is we are running slow because we have too much already saved (my computer is older and not very speedy anyway) ... if you wish to find out more about the speed problem ... or look for another solution ... I suggest a PM to The One and await a reply ...
-- Edited by Bear on Friday 28th of March 2014 10:25:55 PM
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Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit Called or uncalled, God is present
If we are to keep all the LOTR discussion in the same thread, I would suggest the following. Whoever starts the thread will need to reserve the very first post for updates as to what chapter is discussed at what page. This way all the posts pertaining to a given chapter can be located, even though it will not be very convenient. But at least we will be able to revisit any chapter at any time/page and the fact of will be known. Of course highlighting the chapter at the beginning of each post will also be helpful, to facilitate search within each page. It is unfortunate the posts within a thread are not numbered. We might manually number them.
Or maybe others have better ideas concerning this matter? I need to start the Chapter 2 discussion later today, so any help will be appreciated.
Well the reason I was starting a new thread for each section was because I was scrolling through the page of topics and most of them were last responded to 6 months to 7 years ago, so I figured since the site's hardly being used it wouldn't hurt to post 10-15 new threads over the course of 3+ months.
-- Edited by Teralectus on Saturday 5th of April 2014 07:52:03 PM
I thought so too, but hope the way the thread is now, it will at least be searchable. I was not really sure why discussing each chapter separately would be the a new topic for the same thing? I thought that maybe there are archived chapter-by-chapter discussions but I didn't see that. Or they are not visible to regular members.
Like I anticipated, the manual post numbering didn't work. It is inconvenient and cumbersome and I myself often forgot to insert the numbers and had to go back and edit the posts. So I decided to do away with that and introduce a more meaningful way of annotation. I posted links to posts that open the discussion for each chapter. Still if anybody wants to go back and post something on the chapters already discussed, this will be no problem to annotate as well. Hope this helps.
Thanks, JD7. Pity I didn't think of it earlier. Maybe we can start Chapter 6 now, and if more is to be said on 5th (or others) after we start the next one, this will be fine. There might be other threads where some annotation would not hurt too.
