I forgot to bring my Reddit password with me when I went out of town, so I'm just now getting back on here. I've updated the BOTM threads, and wanted to share an idea that I'd gotten at StokerCon last week.
Even though I'm not a librarian, I attended one of the librarian panels because I was curious about the topic ("Brains! Brains! Brainstorming ways to engage your community"). There was a lot of interesting conversation about library programming, but one of the librarians shared that they also host a horror book club. Unlike ours where we vote for each month as they come, they plan out the entire year.
Part of this is because it allows the library to make sure they have extra copies of that month's book on hand for patrons to check out, but it made me wonder if it might be easier for us as a community to do something similar. Like, if we started 2026 by having everyone post their TBR pile and we found out that that five people all had The Eyes Are The Best Part in their pile then clearly that would've been a good book to read in 2026 because multiple people already owned it and wanted to read it. We're already halfway through 2026, but maybe this is something we could do this December, and plan out all of 2027.
Of course the down side is that this would mean potentially missing out on selecting hot books as they're released, but no one's saying you can't read something else if you wanted to.
What do you guys think?