My experience with 📔 A Practical Guide to Evil (Erratic Errata) (among with Disco Elysium) was deeply affected by the way my partner and I read it together.
(Yeah, now in my head Black “canonically” has deep voice and some other unique speech patterns, but this post isn’t about it)
When we began reading together, my partner asked me all sorts of questions: What do you think about this character? Who might have done this and that? With which probability and how soon a certain even will happen, if ever?
This approach somewhat disrupts the reading flow, since from time to time we burst into a lengthy discussion of whatever seemingly minor detail, – but it also made the experience so much richer.
The problem is: there are too many small details to keep track of all of them. I believe some kind of (maybe AI-powered) mindmapping software could help with that: what questions were asked, when and which answers were found.
Moreover, I feel like investigative reading a pretty cool reading club concept, because different people would have different points of view, allowing to engage with the story in a much more multi-faceted way. In particular, my partner suggested started a podcast, and I feel there will be some similarities with Vox Machina’s Dungeons and Dragons sessions: (well, at least in terms of “there is a somewhat stable cast with occasional guests”).
How I see it: each participant is assigned a role depending on whether they read the work of the day and on how much reading experience they have, – and there’s also someone who takes notes, maybe with help of an AI speech recognition tools. Participants read the work/chapter of choice together, stopping from time to time to discuss both pre-made & occasional questions, using only already read part of the work of the day & the knowledge obtained by reading/watching/playing something else. The results of discussion are written down in a flowchart, allowing to connect questions and hypotheses with answers and actual plot points.
The format itself sounds pretty difficult to recreate consistently, therefore:
- It will be better to start from smaller works;
- We might need to prioritize quality over quantity and/or consistency of club meetings / podcast episodes.
upd 2025-08-16: for some reason for a while I thought that my partner and I came up with this idea ourselves. However, it’s not the case, and I should give credit to We want MoR & Not Everything Is A Clue which inspired my partner to try out this format.
[We Want MoR] is a podcast in the style of We’ve Got Worm from Doof Media (formerly The Daly Planet). In this show, Steven Zuber plays the role of the seasoned scholar of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality who leads first-time reader Brian Deacon through the story.
[Not Everything Is A Clue] is a podcast in the style of We’ve Got Worm from Doof Media. We analyze Alexander Wales’s novel “Worth the Candle.” In this show, Eneasz Brodski plays the role of the grizzled veteran with all his skill points in Having Read “Worth The Candle”, while Steven Zuber plays the role of newbie trying to figure out how synergy bonuses work.