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Bought the 'complete' guide to 'The Brothers Karamazov' for our club and it was a waste
Our group in Toledo spent $25 on a fancy reader's guide that promised deep analysis and discussion questions. It just rehashed the plot summary you can find online and the questions were things like 'did you like the book?'. We lost a whole meeting trying to make it work. Has anyone found a good resource for actually tough book talk?
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henry_martin565mo ago
What kind of lazy writer gets paid to ask if you liked the book? That's not a guide, that's a scam. You basically paid twenty five bucks for a glorified Wikipedia page. My old club fell for the same thing with a different classic, total waste of time. You're better off just picking a theme like faith or guilt and arguing about it yourselves. Those premade questions never dig into the hard stuff anyway.
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matthew_dixon5mo ago
Yeah, my professor mentioned this problem with lazy study guides. He said to look for ones that focus on the "Grand Inquisitor" chapter as a key to the whole book's argument about freedom and suffering. That chapter alone can fuel a whole meeting if you dig into why Ivan wrote that poem.
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