Keep in mind while reading this that there have been two dominant schools of thought on how to read a novel in TPRS/CI circles over the past fifteen years – one has been to plow through the book. That has been the position of Susan Gross. Then there is Blaine Ray’s position of reading and discussing and going much slower, with lots of spinning out of text, building of parallel novels, etc.
In 2009 Blaine asked me which one I prefer and I said both. But I never married the two together until now, as expressed below. I do not think that Blaine’s idea was a good one by itself to read novels. It had the critical fault of requiring too much discussion in the target language and not enough reading. People – and I did this for years – would spend most of the class period spinning discussion off the text and reading through only a few pages of the text – a disaster, since reading in my mind is more important than listening in language acquisition.
Here is the link to the old (current) version of R & D – one that I consider weak, watered down, and too shallow and wide compared to the new version, if you need a refresher on that first:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/10/03/five-stages-of-r-and-d/