Animorphs Book Club Planning

[Negrek]

As we were discussing on Discord yesterday, there's been some interest in holding an Animorphs readalong/book club. This thread is to gauge interest and determine what that might look like!

The poll currently covers format: do you want to hold discussions on Discord, or in forum threads? A combination of both? Voice chats are the hardest to organize and prone to critical time zone problems, but it can also be a lot of fun to get everyone together at the same time to talk books through.

The other question is how often to hold the book club! Weekly? Once every two weeks? Twice a week, even? The books are quite short, generally ranging between 15k and 30k apiece, to give you a sense of how long it might take you to finish one. The full series including spin-offs (and we would be reading spin-offs; they aren't precisely mandatory, but some add a lot) is ~60 books, so at the rate of one book per week, we'd need a little over a year to finish the series.

Let me know what sort of preference you might have for format or cadence, or put any other thoughts you have below!

Whether you'd like to join the readalong or are interested in checking out the series on your own, feel free to grab the free, author-endorsed e-books for convenient reading!

 

[Flyg0n]

ohohohoo this is exciting! I suggest maybe doing primarily discord pings bc its easier but maybe we could do "Milestone" VC's? Like every time we finish an 'arc' or a section or something, maybe we can do voice chats? Perhaps.... 4 ayear? idk.

(Voice chats are risky and mentally straining for me personally, but I'm not super picky!)

I also think maybe a book a week could work for me, I'm a fast reader when I want to be

 

[Chibi Pika]

I think discord pings along with an ongoing forum thread would be good! I'd be up for weekly book club discussions.

 

[Seren]

My schedule is kind of... not great by comparison so a forum thread would be easiest for me, personally. I could work with discord pings and such, but my replies would probably happen much later than everyone else's. (Which in a way defeats the point of holding a discussion about them... although it could also re-ignite the topic later on? I dunno. I guess this kind of does depend on what works best for everyone else, too.) Anyway, forum thread is preferred for me.

Edit: Oh, and as far as frequency, once a week (or longer apart) works for me, I could make that happen. Anything less I could probably deal with although it would be, personally, more challenging.

 

[K_S]

Via forum would be the only way I could participate. It looks like fun. Will the group be drawing from the new graphic novel as well or just using the free-to-download books?

 

[AbraPunk]

Awesome!
I can definitely be here if this happens on the forums, but discord pings might also work, depending on time of day.
And I'd say once a week is fine.

 

[windskull]

I'm personally ok with either forum or discord pings on the norm, although I'd be open to the idea of doing a voice chat at certain milestones (maybe once a kid cycle or once every 10 books?). Discord has the positive of being able to type smaller thoughts in real time and makes it easier to just jump in when you have a thought and respond to people. But it's more time restrained than a forum since it's harder to jump in late. On the forums, I feel like you're more likely to get more long, thought out posts, and you're less limited by time restraints. You also have the benefit of being able to look back on other posts easier. And it has the benefit of letting someone whose behind catch up and share their thoughts. But I also feel like the lack of real time interaction can hinder back and forth discussion at times.

For how quickly to read the books, I feel like either one a week or one every other week is the best speed to give people time to read, digest, and respond. My personal preference is one a week, excluding the couple of longer books (the chronicles books, primarily), which would get two weeks.

 

[Negrek]

All right, based on feedback, it looks as though we'll be doing a hybrid Discord/thread model, where Discord will have reminder pings and real-time discussion, while there'll be a forum thread with discussion questions and serving as a more permanent place for thoughts or reactions. We may do the occasional VC for special occasions, like after particular milestones or for some of the spin-off books that are more self-contained, but it won't be a regular feature.

One book/week also looks like the preferred cadence, with more time given for the longer books. Sounds good to me! I figure we'll also follow this reading order, maaaaybe moving the location of The Ellimist Chronicles, but it's a while before we'll need to worry about that. I also figure we won't read the Alternamorphs books, but if anyone would really like to see those done, let me know!

Main thread up soon; let's get this thing started!