Communal reading

I’m sure some if not all of these have been thought of before and experimented with, nor do I have any grand conclusions to offer, but in the spirit of essaying and blundering exploration and musing aloud, here are three small ideas about communal reading I’ve been meaning to write about.

First: an async Google Doc book club. Each chapter could be in a separate tab or doc, or all in one long doc. People leave comments, and since the comments are attached to the relevant part of the text, hopefully spoiler risk is somewhat mitigated. Legally, this would only work with texts in the public domain or Creative Commons. If the Google Doc is public or at least open to later requests/invites, you potentially get the interesting effect of the book club discussions happening over longer periods of time (which could be either good or bad, depending on how the others feel about past books getting resurrected).

Second: a Discord audio channel with synchronous meetings where someone reads a chapter (this part is optional) and people talk about it, via audio and/or text. Writing this out, I suppose it’s basically just an audio-only online book club meeting, isn’t it. Still, the audio-only aspect feels more interesting than a group video call. Perhaps the glamour of radio lingers on from my childhood. (Note that I say this as someone who doesn’t really listen to the radio or to podcasts or anything like that, so my opinion here should not be given much weight.)

Third: I came across this bit from Sara Hendren recently.

In August, my friend M and I start a spontaneous micro book club conducted entirely on shared voice notes. We send seven- or eight-minute missives on the ideas we’re reading together: saints and martyrs, postwar humanism. My smart phone, mostly a diabolical source of idling distraction, affords weeks of asynchronous exchange by making audio communication seamless and intuitive. Now I do voice notes with my niece who’s a new mother and with a young friend sharing the ups and downs of her dating life.

Sounds fun. I wonder whether it scales to slightly larger groups. (Not that it needs to, to be clear. Nothing wrong with small.)

If any of you end up trying any of these out or have already done so, let me know how it goes!