a stack of books.
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As you know if you were there or if you have watched the replay, the Twilight live chat on Friday was hilariously busy — cacophonous beyond my wildest dreams, to say the least. I learned from the experiences of last week that I would tweak our approach significantly in terms of how we set the whole thing up, what the pace is (if it weren't a notoriously quick read, I think we'd go once a week rather than every day for a week, and so forth), and how I keep from being stampeded by readers with interesting things to say if we go live again, but I also learned that we clearly need to keep reading books.

Now Marc was actually kidding when he suggested Moby-Dick, but I have to say, it makes a twisted kind of sense, given that we started off with an "I Will If You Will" approach. There is a symmetry of sorts between a book that people are curious about but are reluctant to read and a book that people are curious about and may have somehow managed to never read. And both popular fiction and classics can fall into these gaps, it seems to me.

So at this point, we're looking for a next book. How do you feel about reading so-called "classics"? I definitely don't want to pick on YA again or romances again; I'd like to switch genres so the same readers don't feel like their strengths/weaknesses (depending on your perspective) are consistently the topics at hand.

We could do super-respected current fiction (we've had The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo suggested), we could alternate relatively current books with old books ... there are lots of options, and since this is a project that really grew up out of the blog and from the interest all of you had, I'd like to get your input on where to go next. (We can talk about format changes later, if that's okay — let's talk about books first.)

Keep a couple of things in mind: there are probably advantages in picking books that are out in paperback, or electronically, or both, or that are not so in demand at libraries that there will be long waiting lists. (One of the nice things about Twilight was that it could be acquired cheaply and easily in a bunch of ways.)

So leave your suggestions in the comments, and we'll talk about it more soon.