Discussion of the discussion

[Kate, Information Wrangler]

How do we want to go about this, guys?

Siling and I have talked about it some, and it seems best if we put up a discussion thread for every few chapters. (Because putting up a thread for every chapter seems like too much, and putting up one thread for the whole book, or even one thread for Book I and another for Book II, seems like too little. Breaking it up into shorter discussion segments also solves the problem of spoilers for people who are reading more slowly.) The only problem with this idea is that Siling's never read it before and I haven't read it in almost ten years, so neither of us has a sense of at what points the story naturally breaks into chunks.

So we can either try to do some research--like maybe searching for reader's guides on the internet, which I'm sure exist--or we can just set threads for x number of chapters, period. (Every two chapters? Three? Five?)

For reference: in Fellowship, there's the Prologue and Notes on the Shire Records at the beginning (and the edition I'm reading also has a Foreword), and then Book I has twelve chapters and Book II has ten.

We could also have an overall General Discussion thread in which we could talk about the book and/or series as a whole--not specific plot points, necessarily, but more general things. (By which I mean, any random things we think of that don't fit into a specific part of the book. The stuff I was talking about in my video last week, about how well LOTR works for reading aloud; Tolkien's love of linguistics; the movies; whatever.)

Ideas? Thoughts? Anything? Anybody? Bueller?

[Mistressredbird]

Do you want to just make an executive decision and split it up however it makes sense to you? Anything I decided would be completely arbitrary, seeing as I'm new with it. (Sparknotes did its analysis by chapter so thats no help with grouping it.)