So we tried to organise the World's Largest Reading group and set some kind of Record.
This hasn't been easy to organise.
Our blogpost here will give you some idea of what we are trying to achieve. We've had further communication with the people at The Guinness World Records, but sadly a way to make this an official World record has not been found.
Thankfully there are still lots of you who want to take part, and we have done our best to get as much sorted out as possible. There's still time to join and read the book (Where Would I Be Without You by Guillaume Musso). It took me less than two days to get through it, so there IS still time.
We have a forum set up here (this is the main discussion area), which also links the Twitterfeed for the hashtag #readinggroup. If you are on Twitter you can use this hashtag in your message, and it will come up on the screen on the forum page.
In order to voice your opinion of the book on the Forum, you need to register. This just means clicking register (in the top right hand corner of the Forum) and putting a name and your email address. We need you to do this to calculate how many people are using the Forum.
We also have a Facebook Page (you need to log in to facebook to see this) which you can also use to join in the discussion on Saturday.
You can come to the Big Green Bookshop at 6.00pm on Saturday and join the debate WITH REAL PEOPLE. There will be snacks and drink to add to the enjoymant.
You can meet amongst yourselves and discuss the book this way too. But if you want to be counted towards the final number of people who were involved in the reading Group you must get in touch via twitter/facebook/forum/telephone/email and let us know how many of you there are.
The discussion will begin on Saturday morning. I'll add a couple of discussion points to the forum and the facebook account and see what happens. I suspect the main discussion will take place in the later part of the afternoon to the early evening.
Thrughout the day you will be able to vote (out of 10) on the book. This will be our most accurate way of working out how many people are involved, so if you are in a group please send individual scores to us (you can send them in one message if you like).
At 8.00pm we shall start to calculate how many people have been involved and what the average score for the book is.
At about 9.00pm we will announce on here, the website, the forum, twitter and facebook;
- The number of people who were involved in the World Record Attempt
- The average score the book was given.
We would have liked to have sorted out one or two more exciting things, like getting video links so that we could discuss the book this way.
Sadly our computer has for the last two weeks refused to work for more than 3 hours at a time, before deciding to stop. It has also started to chew up and delete important things, which hasn't made this any easier.
BUT ONWARDS AND UPWARDS
I'm really grateful for everyone who helped spread the word about this attempt. It seems like there will still be lots of people who are going to be taking part, so whatever happens, it will be good fun.
The whole idea of this was to try and raise the profile of reading groups and to celebrate how great they are, and if we've done that in the tiniest of ways, then we're happy.
Hope to hear from you on Saturday.
