Literary The MR Literary Club 2014-2015 Categories Vote

[sun surfer]

Help us choose the categories that the MR Literary Club will use to alternate for our July 2014-June 2015 cycle.

The poll will be open for seven days.

The vote is multiple choice. You may vote for as many or as few as you like.

There will be four winners. I will not vote in the poll and in the event of a tie, I will cast a vote to break it.

~

Six months of the next cycle will be devoted to rotating selections from our members, leaving six months of other categories. Excluding Lottery, we have 11 categories that have been used by us in the past: Biography & Memoirs, Contemporary, Highly Challenging, Non-Fiction, Obscure, Open, Plays, Poetry, Region, Short and Time Period. You can peruse past categories by month here.

As with last year, I am fast-tracking two categories past the vote - this time, Poetry and Contemporary. These two will be categories for the next cycle. Poetry is one of our more challenging categories and I’d like it to stay, and I’d like to ensure that we have at least one category switch for the next cycle and so have chosen Contemporary.

That leaves four slots open and nine categories with fates unknown. These categories have been arranged alphabetically and listed in the poll, where four will be voted in for our next yearly cycle and five will languish.

So, what are your druthers? Will we have mostly the same categories as last year, mostly different or somewhere in between?

[HomeInMyShoes]

I choose Biography, Open, Plays and Region. I'm not much for overly challenging really and while I like the idea of obscure, I don't like the idea that availability might become difficult; while there might be no correlation there, I worry there might be.

[ccowie]

I'd like some clarification regarding the "region" category. Will this produce a selection of books, each representing a specific region or will a region be selected and then represented with multiple books?

[sun surfer]

Originally Posted by ccowie

I'd like some clarification regarding the "region" category. Will this produce a selection of books, each representing a specific region or will a region be selected and then represented with multiple books?

A region will be selected and then represented with multiple books. The Region and Time Period categories both begin with a one-day poll to determine the specific region or time period for nominations.

Here are the last Region nominations we had and here are the last Time Period nominations we had.

[Bookpossum]

Sooner or later we are going to have to decide in Time Period whether we really want to keep the BCE to 1800 periods, which we have carefully avoided so far. Not a problem yet as we still have quite a lot of 20th century periods to deal with.

Thanks as usual for doing all this preparation, sun surfer.

[sun surfer]

So far it’s looking like we have three clear leaders and a battle royal between all the rest for the fourth spot.

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

Sooner or later we are going to have to decide in Time Period whether we really want to keep the BCE to 1800 periods, which we have carefully avoided so far...

Now's the time for changes. Of course, this hinges on Time Period being chosen as a category for the next year. Here are the periods in question:

BCE
1-1000
1001-1500
1501-1800

I had thought that the club might pick one of these older periods every few years to intermittently give itself even more of a challenge. There’ve been three Time Period months over three years so far and looking back, it is true that none of these older periods have ever come close to winning and all received zero votes this year.

I would like to keep all of the time periods in some fashion, so instead of eliminating any we could combine the first three into a BCE-1500 period. In this way, there'd only be two pre-19th-century periods rather than four.

I’ll leave it up to the majority opinion and give it until the end of the category poll for others to chime in - either leave the time periods as they are or combine the first three into BCE-1500.


ETA- The way in which I had first written the second to last paragraph might have come across as if I preferred not to combine any time periods, so I reworded it to make it clearer that I am fine with either way and only meant that I wouldn't want any time periods outright eliminated.

[Elpida]

Originally Posted by sun surfer

I had thought that the club might pick one of these older periods every few years to intermittently give itself even more of a challenge.

Reading your thoughts I realized, that I have no idea, from which parts of the worlds "ancient" literature exists. So thank you for the inspiration to look for some information , what already seems to be a challenge by it's own.

I stumbled upon an exerpt of a "novel"(from a not surprising part of the world) that made me smile , and I was astonished to see, when it was written. I hope you don't mind, that I share it here.
If you like, try to guess and check out in the spoiler

The thing was getting positively sickening, when Trimalchio, now in a
state of disgusting intoxication, commanded a new diversion, a company of
horn-blowers, to be introduced; and then stretching himself out along
the edge of a couch on a pile of pillows, "Make believe I am dead,"
he ordered. "Play something fine." Then the horn-blowers struck up a
loud funeral dirge. In particular one of these undertaker's men,
the most conscientious of the lot, blew so tremendous a fanfare he
roused the whole neighborhood. Hereupon the watchman in charge of the
surrounding district, thinking Trimalchio's house was on fire, suddenly
burst open the door, and rushing in with water and axes, started the
much admired confusion usual under such circumstances. For our part,
we seized the excellent opportunity thus offered, snapped our fingers
in Agamemnon's face, and rushed away helter-skelter just as if we were
escaping from a real conflagration.

Spoiler:

THE SATYRICON from PETRONIUS, 1st Century AD, translated from Latin by Alfred R. Allsison, N.Y. 1930.

[Bookpossum]

Good point Elpida!

[sun surfer]

As Bookpossum said, that is a great point, Elpida. I'd love to eventually read Satyricon since it's one of the first surviving works to take a novelistic form, and is very interesting and important in describing lower-class life at that time. I've read excerpts and have seen Fellini's loose 1969 film version but have never read all of what survives.

[issybird]

Great quote! I've only read bits of Petronius, arbiter elegantiae, and I always think of Trimalchio in connection with Fitzgerald's suggested title for Gatsby, Trimalchio in West Egg. And glad that he went with something else!

Oh, ETA, I want to say that I'm in favor of collapsing the pre-modern categories.

[Bookpossum]

Great to see some new members voting: Hampshire Nanny, jersyman and drofgnal, and also Synamon who I think has participated once or twice before.

We look forward to your participation each month if you are able to do so!