Corrections Readalong: The Schedule

Apologies for slacking on posts last week. What can I say, just the thought of hosting this Corrections readalong is exhausting.

I was actually in the middle of writing a review of Horns (to be posted later this week...hopefully) when I realized I should probably at least start to figure out the reading schedule for Corrections. I determined roughly how many pages we should read and then I thought I'd find a chapter break around there. Hey, guess what this book doesn't have many of. Chapters! God, Franzen, you're such an asshole.

I now understand why my professors would beg us to all buy the same copy of the book, this way they could just say "read through page 250" and page 250 would be the same for everyone. But I'm going to assume we all have our own copies and just using page numbers won't work. So here's what I figured, but please, if anyone has a better idea, speak up. Because this is already a mess and we haven't even started yet.

October 4th - Intro post! I'd say introduce yourself but I'm pretty sure we all know each other so maybe write a little something about Franzen or this book or why you're doing this

October 11th - Luckily this first chapter break sort of works. Read up to the section titled The More He Thought About It, The Angrier He Got. Plus this title captures my feelings of trying to put this schedule together

October 18th - Here's where things get messy. So I was trying to do roughly 140 pages between each week. Except there is NOTHING, no chapter break, no section breaks, nothing, around this point. Because Franzen is a jerk. So, two options. We can go with more like 200 pages for this section and make it to the next section called The Generator which is on page 336 (in my copy anyway, which is the trade paperback from Picador).

If we think that will be too much Franzen for 1 week, at around page 300 there's a big text block that starts with "Some mysteries of her obsession, Sylvia said, were that she'd been raised as a Quaker..." so we could stop there. I have no idea if that is in the middle of some big important action sequence so if it is, sorry about that. And again, please speak up if anyone has any better ideas.

October 25th - Let's read up to the section called One Last Christmas. That looks like it will work with either Oct 18th section break we go with.

Nov 1st - FINISH HIM! So I realize we're no longer in October but it's ONE DAY later and I thought it better to finish in November than try to cram in the Franzen to just 3 weeks. This can also be our wrap up post for any final thoughts and perhaps plans about how we'll pretentiously work in some Franzen quotes at our next party.

Let's see how many times this readalong makes me feel like this

I'm guessing at least 6.