Proposal for new reading group

[elettaria]

As eye_of_a_cat has mentioned, neither of us has the time to take on the behemoth that is running Dracula again this year, and my plans for running Clarissa, an even huger job, got put on hold. It might happen next year (it's a January start), but meanwhile there are six months to go

Comments

[rachel2205]

I'd definitely read - not a big fan of MP at all but this way I might fall for it by reading other people's thoughts! :) (I have, of course, read a fair amount of criticism of MP, but there's something more inviting about just hearing enthusiastic readers' comments in this setting!)

I am pondering: can voice posts be made to communities? Because an interesting addition to the comm might be to have an occasional chapter read aloud by volunteers. I'd be happy to read, for instance. Or perhaps we could just post in our journals and link to the comm so people could listen in. It would add an interesting dimension to the reception issue, and might provide extra meat for discussion. Or just a bedtime story vibe, at least! :)

[elfbystarlight]

That was where the idea to tie in with Librivox came from - they've got MP available for free in audioformat, chapter by chapter, read by volunteers. We can were planning to link to them with every chapter posting. The amount of fiddling and recording and editing it takes to produce a reasonable recording is too high to really make it worth the effort of duplicating what Librivox has already done, especially given the length of the text in question. :)

[rachel2205]

Ah, yes... I just thought it might be an interesting aspect of the communal reading, if you see what I mean, to have actual members of the community voicepost - but I can see that it would add to administrative issues! :)

[elfbystarlight]

You're right, it would be, but have you ever recorded anything like this? I have - and it's way harder than it looks. :) If you read it straight through without pause, it's full of stops and bloopers, and people rarely have time or ability to read a chapter through in one go so you have to go back and edit bits out, then edit the sections together... it's do-able, and it could be an idea to leave it open in case anyone wants to do so, but I don't think it's practical to have it as a regular feature. Especially when we already have an audiotext available :)

[rachel2205]

Oh, I do a lot of rehearsed readings and the like :) And I think mistakes can be part of the charm of the thing, but that, of course, is just my opinion. :)

[elettaria]

Apart from anything else, it'd be really difficult to keep up with the novel if readings were only started now. Trust me, merely preparing the text for posting on LJ is enough work. Considering that the readers here would be listening to non-professionals whom they don't know reading the text either way, people are going to prefer to listen to something which has already been nicely edited and isn't going to run the risk of lagging behind the chapters that are being posted. I've been listening to LibriVox for a while and mistakes and poor editing really don't improve my enjoyment of the text I'm listening to. Of course, there's nothing stopping you and other readers from going to LibriVox and organising recordings of either Mansfield Park (in which case you'd need to move quickly) or novels we're considering running in the future, in which case we'll happily link to you. I'm currently composing the user info for our yet-to-be-named community, and I'll put in a section about how to do this.

had to say...

[themadblonde]

LOVE the "Labyrinth" icon. ;-)