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Originally Posted by Kevin8or
Thank you. I couldn't think of any additional categories. Some of these would be somewhat redundant, or at least overlap. (We have award-winners as nominees every month; most young adult fiction is also some other category, like sci-fi or fantasy; another mobileread book club is already devoted to literary fiction...)
Truth is, I'm indifferent. I'll abstain and be happy with whatever the majority decides.
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We already have plenty of overlapping categories. Fantasy and Romance are hardly exclusive categories, and Science Fiction Thrillers are also common. Humor-Nonfic is also very possible. And of course, any genre could contain a classic.
Theoretically, every month could just be "Excellent Books," and open to any nominations. The categories exist to give us some starting point for suggestions, not to divide the literary world into 12 equal parts. We have, effectively, 12 infinite categories. The fact that there are not an infinite number of books available in any one of them is irrelevant; there are *more than we can discuss*, even in the nominations threads.
So the issue isn't, "which 12 categories will best divide up All Of Literature for us to choose from," but rather, "which 12 categories do we want to discuss and recommend to each other?" Or, rather--which 9.
"Classics" isn't going away (nor should it, IMHO), and it's a huge shapeless category.
"Free For All" isn't a category; it's our open space for anything we've excluded from everything else. We don't have a "tv show scripts" category, nor are we likely to... but if there's one worth reading, it could go here.
And January's "runners-up" category is basically a "popular among MR readers" category with no connection to any particular genre.
That leaves 9 categories or genres; as much as possible, I'd like them to be different to encourage a wide range of discussions and exposure to different kinds of books.