Shel’s Comments (group member since Mar 05, 2009)

Shel’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

Is anyone else a Joyce Carol Oates fan? If anyone feels like picking up one of her many works I'm up for it. I have We Were the Mulvaneys cracked right now.

(I really need to narrow the current list down to 10. Instead of finishing books I keep adding them!)

Also, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood is a quick read...


We Were the Mulvaneys
Oryx and Crake

I'm up for 100 Years and A Frolic of His Own looks pretty good. The blurb says "dense and imposing" so yeah, sounds like fun.

Does anyone know when David Foster Wallace's new/posthumous one comes out? I believe it's quite a bit shorter than Infinite Jest... an excerpt of it was published in this week's New Yorker. I've only read Consider the Lobster.

This seems too coincidental.

I just started reading this in a bar tonight.

I was interrupted by people who seemed not to believe I was capable of reading such a book.

And indeed, I was not, in a bar, being interrupted.

Hm. I sense a discussion coming on. Anyone read it before who might be able to help guide? Like... how to break it down, etc.? I've read Love in the Time of Cholera, but haven't read Solitude since college... Latin American Lit class...

Oh yeah?

Invitation
If you are a dreamer, come in.
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er a pray-er, a magic bean buyer...
If you're a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!
--Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

Yeah, Ben's list puts my own to shame. I'm practically illiterate.

(But I WILL have my revenge! PFL is on the way to his doorstep as I type!)

OK I'll add another dos centavos. I haven't seen the GR guidelines (not a moderator) but in my experience...

First, agree to rules (start with a very short, open list of these and don't overreact in creating new ones to every schmo who posts something stupid, while, as Ben puts it, keeping it real)

Second, either rotate full responsiblity by week or month (week works better for most people) -- including cleaning out threads, wagging fingers at users, accepting or finding new members (using current reads/bookshelves)

2b - agree to a set of responsibilities and dish them out on a rotating basis to the moderators

3. Number of moderators --> proportional to number of members because the job gets bigger as the group does.

Wow, 15 years of this online group stuff seems to be helping someone out, finally... haven't used this many internet culture brain cells in years!

I agree that MySpace in general has jumped the shark, though I still really like it for the music, and I will say that I have been on GoodReads almost every day because of the reviews you guys post.

I'm for it as long as we can get people to move, and I think you'll be able to bring the core group over, as well as grow it pretty quickly.

It sounds like you've tested it out pretty well, Mo. I think multiple moderators is a great idea... as long as the people who do it all agree to a set of rules and follow them so as to not step on each other's toes... that's just from experience...

I've been part of a mostly online group that required email list moderation of 4,000 members, an online discussion group, a website with articles... and in that group we basically agreed to a set of rules like -- what is a spammer and what do we do about them -- do we clean out membership ourselves to pare the numbers down or let it grow on its own without deleting people until they flame? Do people who respond to flames get a warning? How many flames does a user get before they are booted? And so on. That may be too many rules for us... the group I helped run was a professional networking one so we kinda had to have a lot of etiquette to protect our reputation.

Anyway, I thought your argument was persuasive!