Book Club - Poll or no Poll?

RE*AC*TOR

Do you want a poll to vote for the book to be read in Book Club #2 - or is it fine the way it is - Catcher in The Rye?

LoLth

stickied as promised.

Sleepy

From the overwhelming response to this, I'm gathering that most people, like myself, have either already read the novel or don't want to.

gogo

mmmm... I wonder if Oprah had as much trouble with her book club.

Yeah, stick up a poll if you want, I agreed to Catcher in the Rye because I've never read it before.
But use suggestions from the other thread - I couldn't really be bothered waiting another month for suggestions to roll in again.

LoLth

which is exactly the problem. No-one could be bothered. Everyone loves to plan. Everyone loves to complain but as soon as someone does something, everyone loses interest.

The book club #1 ran on a poll where only 1/2 of the people that expressed interest in a book club actually voted.

The discussion thread, put up almost a month after the poll resolved sat there for two weeks with a grand total of 5 posts... two of them being mine, and one of them being the "this is a book club thread" post.

The "should there be a poll" thread may get attention, but until someone actually posts a poll, gathers the suggestions (which only started coming in properly once the complaint about nothing being done originally appeared) etc, nothing will happen.

So, I use dthe suggestion thread as a proxy poll. only two books got a "I second that" and of those Catcher in the Rye was the clear favourite. Now, I dont really care who organises a book club. Someone do it. I tried, the response was woeful (until other people started posting in the discussion, people who had not originally expressed interest), so I have elected to go for the method of least effort (and time).

Reactor, you want a poll. Post it. Organise the threads (I'll sticky them as they go up) etc. But htis "poll about a poll" is a bit like "voting on whether to put forward a motion to arrange a vote to decide what delegate approaches the UN with a proposal to be voted upon at some stage in the future". ie: a waste of time. You want to organise, then do it. Dont just sit back and point out how others dont do things the way you would.

Excuse my bluntness but I'm having a crap week and my patience is at an all time low.

RE*AC*TOR

Your bluntness is excused - no probs here. I understand you put alot of effort into the last one - and it not being a great success was abit of a pain in the ass. But this thread wasn't necessarily going to be redundant - I mean there was the chance that people would've said it was fine as it was - and we could've proceeded to do Catcher in the Rye.

In the suggestion thread there were 14 posts, 10 individual books were posted, +2 from teh last poll - so that's twelve books. 4 people went for Catcher in The Rye (one of whom also suggested Catch 22).

With Book Club #1 there were 25 responses in all - 7 were yours, 5 were mine. That's almost half with two people. There was very little effort to actually "converse", rather just mostly seperate points independent of each other.

Honestly - I don't have much hope for this book club (would love to see it work). The fact of the matter is people forget - most don't check this forum much. Maybe a group PM system could help? (For people who have expressed interest). This would remind people of the various stages etc.

I'd be happy to put up a poll of the books, but a I said I don't think this thread I completely redundant. So I'd prefer to give it a couple of days.

John

I think just put up a poll of suggestions, if people want to read Catcher in the Rye they'll vote for it.

RE*AC*TOR

Ok - that's long enough for this poll - the books for the Book Club are:-
Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre
Everything is illuminated by Jonathan Safron Foer
Despatches by Michael Herr
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish by Richard Flanagan
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Star Of The Sea by Joseph O Connor
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Tietam Brown by Mick Foley
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Catcher In The Rye by JD Salinger

This is 11. As far as I know the polls can only have 10 entries... solution? We could leave out the 2 entries carried over rom the last Book Club:
Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre
Everything is illuminated by Jonathan Safron Foer
????

John

Yes, leave out Vernon God Awful!