Literary The MR Literary Club • Welcome, Information & General Discussion

[sun surfer]

Originally Posted by BelleZora

Looks wonderful, Desertblues!

Indeed!

[HomeInMyShoes]

That's just evil Desertblues. Evil. Waking up to another -28C windchill morning this morning.

[Bookpossum]

Never mind, your turn at summer will come!

Hope you are having a great time, desertblues.

[HomeInMyShoes]

It just can't come soon enough. Hope the travels go well desertblues.

[sun surfer]

I mentioned something similar a year or two ago, but looking over recent selections I want to mention it again - I love how international our selections continue to be. In the last year or so, we've had authors from Italy, Ireland, Canada, U.S., U.K., Philippines, France, China, Turkey, Egypt and Poland.

[Bookpossum]

We are definitely not stuck in a rut! I really value the way in which the Club gives me the chance to explore countries and writers I would not normally come across.

Thank you all for this broadening of my reading.

[desertblues]

Yes, my to-be-read list is growing at a very fast pace. I do appreciate the choice of the good books that come from the different nominations.

[fantasyfan]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

We are definitely not stuck in a rut! I really value the way in which the Club gives me the chance to explore countries and writers I would not normally come across.

Thank you all for this broadening of my reading.

Originally Posted by desertblues

Yes, my to-be-read list is growing at a very fast pace. I do appreciate the choice of the good books that come from the different nominations.

I agree and am so glad that modern technology has been such a useful factor in allowing us to so easily avail of the pleasure. I can remember when a book club was limited to what a local library and/or book store could provide. Inter-library loans could take ages to provide some texts. It could take me weeks to get a particular book. Now one can usually get a digital edition more quickly--though sometimes dificulties can still exist.

[sun surfer]

We’re nearing the end of our yearly cycle and will begin a new one in July, so the time for changes is upon us. If anyone has any suggestions, now is the time!

The rotating months are going great and we’ve now made it to two full years and 12 volunteers and counting without a reset. That’s an accomplishment for out little club and I want to again say thanks to everyone for making it such a success.

In general, the nomination and poll time lengths and schedule and such are also all working well.

I see us continuing with all that just as before, if the rest of you do as well.

Onto the new changes:


*The six non-rotating months’ categories are up for review - We’ll have a poll to choose all six categories for the next year and it will include all club categories current and former. It will start in about a week or so and will run for a week. If anyone thinks they may not be here for the entire time that the poll is open, please let me know ahead of time and we’ll make arrangements.


*The Time Period and Region category pre-polls and the yearly categories poll will have new tie-breakers - I’ve never liked being the tie-breaker for a few reasons, but did it so that we’d have a simple, quick and non-arbitrary way to resolve ties. Now I think it’d be better to have some other way even if it is slightly more complex or arbitrary, though we’ll still try to keep the tie-breakers as simple as possible. Though not the reason for the change, this of course means that I’ll now be eligible to vote in those polls like any other member.

For the Time Period and Region pre-polls, first listed will take precedence in a tie. This translates to the older time period and whatever region happens to be listed first. From the start I’ve been re-arranging the regions list each time in a specific set cyclical order based on location and will continue to in the same way, so while not exactly random it should be enough for our purposes.

For the yearly categories poll, in the event of a relevant tie we’ll have a three-day single-choice run-off. In event of another relevant tie, we will then combine the tied categories for the year and be done with it.


*Basic guidelines will be included each time I ask for a rotating nominator - It’s a pretty small thing, but I think it’ll help a little. One thing is that we had discussed nomination maximums back at the start but I didn’t remind people nor enforce any. We’ve had a few people nominate a lot and it worked well but now that I’ll be posting the guidelines each time maybe it’d be better to include a set max, of say ten. With a minimum of four, that’ll still give a good range to decide on for the nominator.


*Bonus votes - Now, onto a bigger change in our midst. This is based on suggestions from others in previous years and I’ve been mulling over it for awhile now. Now is as good as any time to try it.

The idea is simple - anybody who participates regularly in the club gets “bonus votes” on poll results. Nothing will change with nominations, nothing will change during polls, everyone will vote just as before and all are still welcome. However, at the end of a poll anyone eligible for bonus votes will have any and all votes they cast on the poll doubled. This will be done manually by me and then final vote results will be announced in a post in the poll thread.

Just as before, no one will be able to change their votes once cast and anyone eligible for bonus votes will not be able to pick and choose which of their votes are doubled - everything they vote for will be doubled and everything they don’t vote for will still get zero votes from them - so as always everyone makes their selections when they vote on the poll and that’s it.

To qualify for bonus votes, you will need to have contributed to at least two out of the last six discussion threads. Simple as that. The qualification is subject to change as we test this out, but for now pretty much any post in a discussion thread will count.

Caveats: 1) Eligible posts need to be made by the month after the selection (e.g. October or November for October's selection), 2) Eligible posts need to be a month or so apart (this is not exact, but basically if you haven't made any other posts, you can't quickly post to two threads at once and expect to get bonus votes) and 3) Eligible posts need to be made before a poll is posted (i.e. there will be no updating eligibility during a poll). In each poll thread, I will post a list of those eligible for bonus votes.

If any of this sounds at all confusing, don’t worry. I hope it will go smoothly and easily once we get the hang of it. This is to give our regulars and even semi-regulars a bonus while still welcoming everyone and anyone whenever they want to participate, and anyone interested can qualify for bonus votes within a couple of months.

I’ve worked to make this as simple to implement as I possibly could. In many months there may be no change from the poll tally at all because everyone that voted may be eligible for bonus votes.

To be clear, whether new or long-time member, any of you interested in literature and our club can still vote, join in or drop by whenever you want and we encourage you to, even if you don’t qualify for bonus votes.

So, what do all of you think of this idea? It would only be on a trial basis. We could try it for a little while and if we don’t like it we’d scrap it, but if it works well we’d keep it. We’d start with the yearly categories poll we’re about to have.


Comments and reactions to any part of this post are welcome. After we get all this sorted out, we’ll be good for another year!

[Bookpossum]

Thanks for this sun surfer. I think it's sounding good and in particular I really like the idea of bonus votes for regular participants. As long as that isn't too difficult and time-consuming for you to do manually, then I think it could be an excellent solution to problems we have talked about previously.

I would like to make a couple of suggestions, to see what you and other members think. Here goes:

1. The six non-rotating months. When you list the various topics we have had, it should probably give us enough to choose from. Is it feasible to ask if members have suggestions for any other topic? (I can't think of anything at the moment, but others might.)

2. The rotating months. Now we have pretty well all had a go, and with our numbers currently down, should we consider fewer rotating months (e.g. four rather than six in a year) and consequently more set topics? This would take the pressure off the smaller number of participants to "step up to the plate".

3. Another option would be to stay with the six and six split (which has certainly worked well to date) and agree to take our turns in the same order as we did last time around. From memory, sun surfer went first, I went second, and I can't remember the order after that, but we could easily look it up. That would then take the pressure off sun surfer calling for a volunteer each time - it would just be a case of saying, okay Bookpossum (or whoever), it's your turn next month, and if we were listed in the programme, we would all have plenty of notice to think about our nominations.

4. Time Period and Region suggestions. If these two get up, I think that's as good a solution as any in the case of a tie. As you say sun surfer, it then lets you have a vote as well, which I think is only fair.

So in summary, good suggestions sun surfer and I hope my suggestions in turn don't add unnecessary complications. If they do, everyone will no doubt feel free to ignore them!

[HomeInMyShoes]

I'm not overly happy with the region concept as some regions have so many countries and so much population and other regions have very little. Meaning that our worldwide coverage is skewed a little. I don't know how you solve it, but perhaps picking a random group of countries might be more conducive to getting a broader range. This might just be me and my current interests in South-East Asia, especially Cambodia, Malaysia, Japan and China as well as South America and Central America.

But that's just me.

[Bookpossum]

I agree with you HIMS, and the other difficulty we have had, e.g. with our last Region month, was being able to find books by authors from the area. I suppose one way round this problem would be to allow books set in the area but by authors from other cultures, such as Somerset Maugham for example. I have just had a look at the Regions still to be selected: the South Pacific could well be rather a challenge, as might Korean Peninsula, Mongolia and China.

The Time Periods are narrowing in choice too: BCE to 1500, 1501 to 1800, 1921 to 1940 and 1941 to 1960. So we might select the two 20th century period in the next couple of goes, but then I suspect we might want to leave the earlier periods.

Still, I expect we shall work out our preferred topics when we vote on them.

[HomeInMyShoes]

We should only be reading books from 1947 to 1973.

There are a lot of countries with very few published or translated into English books. I've probably only got a dozen or two countries left that will be fairly easy to locate a book for. There's a reason Western Africa has proven hard for me to navigate (almost everything is only in French) and the Caribbean, Polynesia and Melanesia areas are just so unpopulated there is very little selection. I've found a few, but then even locating copies of the books is very difficult.

What if we just made the region vote into a journey around the world one where we have to pick an author from a country we haven't covered yet? That might keep things open enough that we'd be able to find books a little more easily.

[Bookpossum]

That might work! If we broke up the regions where we might more easily find authors translated into English (and available), e.g. one region is Portugal, Belgium, The Netherlands, Spain and France, and took one or two countries at a time - say Spain and Portugal, Belgium and The Netherlands, and France on its own, we could keep going for ages.

What do you think sun surfer?

[Bookpossum]

Hey team - no other comments? Poor old sun surfer needs some encouragement after all that typing!