Brain Pain discussion

Hello Everyone,

The results for the recent poll question about next year’s reading schedule are:

90 votes (97.8%) - Yes, I can read/discuss one of these next year
2 votes (2.2%) - No, these are not for me

And so, we’ll continue the Brain Pain group in 2014. I’ll publish a description and schedule for the year in about 10 days or so.

For our second Poll, I’ve been considering changing how I post the weekly book discussions. While reading a long book like 1Q84 (scheduled for 10 weeks), some people get far ahead of the schedule and don’t like to wait for the others to catch up. To help facilitate the different reading speeds of the group members, I propose posting all of the weekly threads for a given book at once, and the faster readers can comment in the various threads as they progress through the book.


How it is now:

Example: Book X is 420 pages long. I generally divide up a book into roughly 100 page sections, so in this example, Book X would be scheduled for 4 weeks, with a discussion of the book as a whole incorporated into the fourth week. The reasoning is that most people can keep up with a reading pace of 15-20 pages per day. So, the first weekly discussion would cover the first 100 pages, the second weekly discussion would cover the second 100 pages, and so on.

Under the current system, each weekly discussion thread is posted Monday morning for each of the four weeks. The faster readers have to wait for the threads to post each successive Monday, and I suspect this may diminish interest in contributing to the later discussions.


Proposal for a new method:

Using the above example, on the first Monday scheduled for Book X, all 4 discussion threads will be posted at once. They will still be labeled as Week One, Two, Three, and Four, but they will all be available for the faster readers to comment on as they complete each segment of the schedule. There may be a time lag between the faster reader comments and the more leisurely readers (like myself), but at least they will be able to contribute their comments while they’re fresh.

Hopefully I’ve explained this clearly. You can ask questions in the comments section of the poll, or you can send me a message.

Vote options are:

Keep the current weekly discussions method
- or –
Change to the new discussions method for 2014


The poll will be open until 10/23 and can be found here:

https://www.goodreads.com/poll/list/5...


If the vote is in favor of the change, we can try the new method when we read Giles, Goat-Boy in November.

Thanks!

Jim


PS. Welcome to all of the new members who have joined the group since my last message!