ATD Organized Read and Discussion

[Will Layman]

I agree with Dave that we should not start the groupread to quickly.   
You don't want to miss it, but you don't want the groupread to screw  
up your own interaction with the book.  That action -- your own  
reading and feeling and thinking and recalling -- is the action that  
makes a novel complex and interesting.  No offense to people here,  
but I don't want you to muck up my first chance at that on my own.

I'd also like to say this, regarding the Malign/Millison question, if  
indirectly:

We should feel free to find fault with AtD, to criticize it, to  
squeeze it and complain about it and rip it if need be.  But it would  
be nice to have a buffer before the groupread so we can avoid hearing  
the inevitable, "But it's not GR!"  Like when a favorite band comes  
out with a new album, how often does it live up to your deep, years- 
in-the-making affection for their older "better" stuff?

I'm not saying that you have to like everything Pynchon writes, but  
I'm equally uninterested in reading people bitching about a new book  
as being "no good" or "no GR" -- at least until we all have read the  
whole damn thing.  Until you've read it all, complaints ought to be  
de facto premature.

-- Will Layman


On Nov 2, 2006, at 7:19 PM, davemarc wrote:

> Okay, it's coming back to me now in a slightly different way.
>
> With M&D there was a reading period that enabled folks to read the  
> damn book
> on their own.
>
> The spoiler protocol enabled discussion to go on without, um,  
> spoiling for
> anyone.
>
> Then the organized group read/discussion began--at a reasonable  
> date. I
> think the spoiler protocol started fading around that time, though  
> it was
> still important for a while to use ordinary spoiler warnings.
>
> I agree with the sentiment that post 1/1 would be a good time for the
> organized group read/discussion to begin. Maybe a week or two into  
> 2007?
>
> d.
>