The brainstorming thread

How we are going to proceed? Which rules are we going to make? How are we going to do the voting-process? Are we going to work in categories? Genres?

Brainstorm about it here!

First, do you have a particular number of books in mind?
I like 1001; it's huge and sort of crazy to attempt them all, but still possible in a lifetime.

Also, what sort of books do you want to include? Poetry, drama, non-fiction? I'm inclined to go with more variety rather than less.

I was thinking about 750 or 1000. Still ambitious, but hey: that's what we are! And yes, I was thinking about to include poems and non-fiction, I missed those on the 1001 list. With drama, do you mean plays, like Shakespeare? Didn't think about that, but I guess it is worth a shot to include them. I'm sure there are classics in that category too.

How is this idea: we can split up fiction, non-fiction, poems and drama/plays into genres. We could work from a long list to a shortlist, with 5 or 10 titles per genre at the end? It should prevent multiple mentions of a writer. With this people could be stimulated what they consider the best book of a genre/writer. Could be surprising.

Yup, by drama I mean Shakespeare. I can't imagine a complete list of must-read books that leaves him out.

I don't know about having a fixed number of books per genre; I think it might end up leaving out some important books in crowded genres and allowing other less important books just because there wasn't as much competition in a given genre.

This may be a ridiculous idea, but I think it would be interesting and possibly productive if everyone individually produced a ranked top-100 list (maybe not fully ranked, since that would make for some very difficult decisions, but at least split into ten groups based on importance) and then a book got points based on its position in each person's list (10 points for being in position 1-10, 9 for 10-20, 1 for 90-100, etc.).

Hm, might that strategy prevent that a writer pops up frequently in the list? Not quite sure about it, but isn't a bad idea.

Just another suggestion, we could work genre from genre. Morphidae is busy with 1500 best fantasy books. If we take that list as an example, we can open polls/votes for which titles should end up on the main list: LT's big 750/1000. This way it would be more fun and in the end we have a main readinglist, as well as readinglists for each genre.

We could always just arbitrarily decree a maximum number of works per author.

I like the idea of having lists for each genre, but I'm not sure the main list has to be composed of those lists. It could be multiple separate projects (in case making a big list isn't ambitious enough already!). I think a list made up of different genre lists would end up overweighting some genres and underweighting others.

Not limiting to novels is good, but we might have to decide what we mean by a "book" - do we go with the smallest self-contained unit (haiku, play, novel), or the unit of publication (Shakespeare's Plays; 1001 great Haiku), or with whatever gets us nearest to a single volume?

I think sub-lists are a good idea, because we don't want to get bogged down at the very beginning arguing about the relative importance of things that can't sensibly be compared (Ovid versus Sherlock Holmes).

What do you think about period and place? Is it worth creating separate buckets to make sure that the 17th century gets a fair crack of the whip, or that we include enough African writers?

We're discussing in English - are we going to limit to books available in English? Should we make buckets for books from other language-traditions, or let them fight it out with the British/American/Commonwealth books?

we might have to decide what we mean by a "book"

I'd say whatever gets us nearest to a single volume. So I'd count Shakespeare's plays separately, since they're often published individually (and it seems like an easy way out to just say "read all of Shakespeare"), but I'd list a collection of short poems.

I think sub-lists are a good idea, because we don't want to get bogged down at the very beginning arguing about the relative importance of things that can't sensibly be compared (Ovid versus Sherlock Holmes).

But sublists would have the same problem, we'd just have to argue more generally: how many fantasy novels should there be compared to classics? I'd rather let everyone list the books that they think are most important, without restrictions, and see what happens. The same goes for 17th-century, African writers, other languages, etc. I think the most important thing is the books, not the categories.

Hm, that might be indeed the best. It's how Morphidae did hers. And the voting process will eventually 'clean' the list. We can always do sublists afterwards if we want.

About the definition of books: I agree with Zoe's take on it, but what about series like Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, His Dark Materials? With the fantasy-list it was decided that series were treated as 1 book. I am against it, but what do you think?

I wouldn't really mind treating a trilogy or even a short series like Narnia as a single book. LoTR seems like a bit of stretch. I don't feel strongly about it either way, though.

2 points

1) I don't think we should make up an arbitrary cut off number fr books by authors - some authors have written several great books and I would hate to leave a deserving book off just because of an arbitrary rule.

2) Just think of when you do the 1001 list and how annoyed we get when a certain series (Taebeck mountains for instance) is made up of several books and not just one. We complain about that.

I for one wouldnt like to read three long books (LOTR) in order to get one credit.

We have to make this book user friendly.

What we could do is call the books 1001 and then divide it up - 100 best mysteries, 100 best love stories, 100 best contemporary, 100 best poetry collections, 100 best plays - etc etc etc

#11, I agree with you about the series part.

About authors: methinks that in the voting process it will clean up itself. I have faith in my fellow Thingamabrians ;-)

About sublists: I guess it is best to focus first on the mainlist. That will be difficult enough.

I agree with the feeling that the "voting process" will clean things up and resolve issues around:

- trilogies/tetrologies and invididual books
- number of books by a single author
- number of books in a genre

and so on. I think one challenge is to establish the list. It might be nice to get an LT membership to start adding books to a library. Then each of us can indivually tag the book at "On the List" or "Off the List". Somehow we need to enforce the "one reader, one vote" rule.

I think it might also be valuable to establish the "authors" list. I use the "1001" list that way. These are authors I want to read even if I don't choose to read all of their listed books.

Check out the LT "Books on Books" Group. There are many good lists out there of the so-called "classics". With a limit of 1001, I would have thought Boxall would have included a few more of these oldies but goodies.

Well, we are already starting off small. I would like to call this the Input-fase. People can put in their ten books and we are starting from there.

When do we go to the next fase, the nomination fase? About two months? Six months?

I am going to set-up a spreadsheet, to build up the list. I propose that

#1 after the end of the Input-fase, I publish the first 750/1000. Then people can nominate, and the votes decide on which number a book will finally be. They can nominate one book or more books.

Or we could do

#2: I am going to publish the WHOLE list and people can send in their nominations which book or books has to end up on the list of 750/1000.

Thoughts?

I can setup the spreadsheet at Google Docs, for everyone to see (but of course not editable :P ), if this is OK with everyone.

There is a series-problem already: Dark materials is nominated and (stupid me) Lord of the Rings. We can intervene now, since it hasn't gotten much attention yet, but we need to decide something: series, count as one book or not? Contrary to my nominations, I am against...

I'd like to wait and see how the list-top-10-books phase goes before deciding how to proceed from there. But I think a possible second step would be a list-top-100-books phase, and then the list could be compiled directly from there without separate nomination and voting phases.

I'm becoming convinced that trilogies should be counted as a single book. It just seems much easier.

I think we should have a plan before people finish writing their top 10, otherwise this could fall away very easily. If we were to wait until people voted for their 10 favourites and then asked them to vote for their 10 best plays, and continue like that for as many categories as we feel we need. We'd have some books discarded as they'd already have been nominated. After all of the nominations were in, we could write up the list and discuss it. If there were books people felt weren't deserving of a place on the list, they could bring up a discussion about removing that book from the list. People could also discuss which book should top the list and where the rest should go. By the end we probably wouldn't have 750 or 1,000, but I don't think we should add or take out book just to make the list fit a certain number.

As for trilogies or series, I think they should be counted as a single book, certainly if they can be bought as a single book.

Wow, long post. What do people think?

You know, we can also probably pull some titles from the "I can't believe it's not there" thread under the 1001 group...

I agree with Sophie - we need to keep up the momentum on input; it's too early to start weeding.

Perhaps we should stick with asking for lists of ten books at a time - that's a manageable number, and allows other members to have a proper look at the books suggested. We could ask for themed lists, maybe with a longer time limit and each on a separate talk thread. The danger, of course, is that if you ask for "your ten favourite Bulgarian plays" some participants may lose interest in the whole process. Maybe we could do things like "top ten books starting with W"

One thought: should we put the list-in-progress on a WikiThing page (or a number of pages)? That would make it easier to keep track of the current status than on Talk pages, and we could try to find a way to lay it out so that people could add votes/comments on why each book should be in or out.

I'd say we should move from Top 10 to Top 25 and see how that goes. There wasn't very much overlap with the Top 10, but with Top 25 I'd guess we could have at least 100 books that occur more than once.

The great thing is that we don't need to decide on one specific way to do things, we can just try a bunch of different stuff and see what works.

Thank you, Zoe.

Bumping up this topic again, as it still sounds like a fun idea to me.

*bump* Someone still in to make the list of lists?