Actually I think you DO need one before becoming a Citizen. I'd direct you to the appropriate place in the Membership Manual but I'm on my phone so I can't access it easily. :\
Oh, if you click the little button at the bottom of a post that looks like quotation marks with a +, that will allow you to select multiple posts to respond to at once. :)
Welcome to another long time fan! I've been reading the books since sometime in the 1990s ... so quite a long time now. :P The book discussions, although not particularly active, are always fun to explore. If you have read all the books, I suggest checking out the current reread thread...