The first reading had some good discussion and I was very satisfied with it. The second reading had only one post that wasn’t from me. The third reading had none.
I'll probably finish rereading the book on my own, and I highly recommend it to anyone who's interested history of the West in the 20th century.
Sorry it didn't work out! I was unable to contribute as its a big book and I've been busy reading other stuff. I'll read it eventually and maybe we can find a good format for such discussions in future.
I've been reading along and following the postings but I haven't posted myself. I will finish it as well. I may post in the first few threads. Shall we post here if we have any follow on thoughts about the rest of the book?
While “live” discussion can be enriching, I find that it can be very difficult to manage that online. Two options that seem to work decently online:
* Set a hard deadline for the whole book and then break up the discussion by section (likely less effective as size of text grows, and probably better orchestrated in a groupchat than an anonymous forum) * Give in to asynchronous discussion (I have participated in a few Discords centered around math textbooks with a channel per chapter and it works great — on an anonymous forum it might mean periodically bumping your own threads as time goes on)
Having written all this, I do think the difficulty here is the “anonymous forum” part — you’ve got no filtering mechanism and no commitment mechanism, which the other things I am thinking of do have. Perhaps you can fish for participants here, but take it elsewhere?