Online monthly book club

Quality

Right there used to be an on line monthly book club here, It was great!

Would anyone be interested in mucking in to get a new one going?

Procasinator

Sounds good to me.

The hardest part would be to get people interested and to pick the book.

If you suggest a book for August (or a few and rely on a poll for votes), I'll definitely, as you say, muck in.

Quality

Great, that's how it worked the last te! Hopefully we can get some more people to take interest and kick start for august!

lemon_sherbert

I like how optimistically you view our last efforts - it fell apart the month I was supposed to run it, so I'll stay in the background. I've not much chances to read these days doing summer work, but if the chosen book is one in my plan I'll join in

Quality

Hey lemon

I would love if you could help us out!

If you wanna share the plan

Denerick

I'd love to help start it up again. Providing I don't get site banned this time

Can I nominate the books??? (Attention whore alert)

Procasinator

You should nominate some books Denerick. Get the ball rolling. We can always devise a more accurate method to nominate books in the next round, but I think if we get a book quickly into action and start a thread for it, maybe this will work.

I'm unaware of what happened last time, so maybe I'm being optimistic.

bp1989

I'm in.

Denerick

Procasinator wrote: »

You should nominate some books Denerick. Get the ball rolling. We can always devise a more accurate method to nominate books in the next round, but I think if we get a book quickly into action and start a thread for it, maybe this will work.

Your can do attitude contrasts starkly with your username. I'm afraid to take the lunge. I wouldn't know how to decide on the books. Maybe we should wait until more express interest first.

Denerick

Although a good idea this time would be to take on the booker longlist? Keep it topical? If somebody narrowed it down to say, four books, we could then have a poll?

It might get more people interested, as its not like we're going to be reading one of Dicken's more obscure novels..

Quality

Or maybe if we keep it to different genres
We could all nominate a Different book from a different genre and the one who gets the most votes

Comedy
Irish writers
American greats

Procasinator

I like the sound of both genres and the booker longlist.

I would lean more to the booker longlist, however, as with genres, someone needs to pick the genre before we even pick the book.

One thing I might recommend if we go down that route, however, is that maybe we start with a longlist of a previous year, for instance 2008. Often these books will be cheaper to purchase and are more likely to be available in local libraries than books that are in the longlist for 2010. This may allow the bookclub to be more inclusive.

From the 2008 longlist, I have only read one book (The White Tiger), and would be more than willing to read it again.

Does this sound reasonable? The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga can be got for €4.33 (delivered) from the book depository:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9781843547228/The-White-Tiger

While the next in the list, Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold can be had for €7.18:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9780955647611/Girl-in-a-Blue-Dress

I think the main hurdle is doing the first book club. Just some suggestions, but personally I'm up for reading anything if anyone wants to kick it all off.

And Denerick, sometimes my username couldn't be any truer. :P

Denerick

I'm in favour of the booker longlist. Though I can understand the idea of having a previous years list, I think having this years longlist will keep it topical and contemporary. Though I don't really mind.

How about this; we'll sit on until after the bank holiday weekend, and see what people think after that?

Personally I don't like the genre's idea as one of the problems last time was that it just got so confusing... I mean, we had two books (One contemporary, one classical)

Either way I don't think we should launch the book of the month thing until at least 10 people have expressed interest.

Denerick

**** it. I'll make a poll now. The book club will either live or die by the sword!

Quality

Good man!

Cheetara

Just spotted this thread today. I'd be really interested in joining up if it's still going ahead.

Denerick

Cheetara wrote: »

Just spotted this thread today. I'd be really interested in joining up if it's still going ahead.

Yep, still is. See the thread in the forum.

Procasinator

As Denerick has said, the thread for voting on the book is currently up:
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055985881