Quote:
Originally Posted by HomeInMyShoes
I'm worth picking on and it's a valid point and good question.
They are just genres within fiction. Fiction was the last category I added to my list. I was looking through all the books I've read worth sharing in the last few years and there was no place to nominate most of them. They are non-genre fiction. Without plain fiction we are missing a large portion of books out there. I am hypocritical in that respect. Why fiction and non-fiction mean different things. One is about including and one is about excluding? I can only argue personal preference. Your preference or anyone else's is no more wrong or right than my preference.
I want the book club to be fiction and not non-fiction. Some may want more non-fiction than fiction. Which is where Issybird's point about subgroups and categories makes a lot of sense. I might go with four votes per person, but that's a statistical argument based on an assumption of sample size and what I think I know about the group (all of which could be wrong.)
I see lots of potential non-fiction categories: history, biography, self-help, health, religion, philosophy, cooking, etc. being viable categories. We make guesses, but I don't think we're a religion and cooking bookclub. Maybe we are though, maybe that's what is wrong. I am perfectly willing to brainstorm and be mocked and be wrong. I know I am one of those weird people that just reads plain fiction and am a complete geek about a few splinter subjects. Who here wants to read about information and classification, urban planning, music, math, and human-computer interaction?
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Yes, my post was to just illustrate the varied preferences that exist here even among those who are participants in these discussions. Trying to satisfy everyone is impossible, and the more one satisfies one person the less likely the all will be happy.
Here are a few thoughts that occurred to me this morning . . .
Since the preference among this group does seem to be for fiction, why not just make this club a fiction club without any specific categories? That is every month a free for all fiction month, except perhaps for one second chance month a year?
One possible way to do this would be to just automatically nominate all the entries for the
NYT Best Seller list for the last week of the previous month (or some similar source) and vote on that. Or some similar list that would satisfy those who want to avoid “old and musty books” as well as provide some variety of the type of fiction. Granted this would likely leave a large number here who would be happy with a diet of only SF and/or Fantasy unhappy, but since I first started participating here I've always thought that there would be enough interest for a club dedicated to just those two similar categories.
I really have no suggestions for how to up participation in the actual discussion which IMHO is the reason for a club like this to exist. Virtual pizza and beer does not sound near as appealing as the real thing. Maybe some sort of reward for contributions to the discussion?
I agree that the participation in the book club, and later two clubs, has steadily decreased in the time (now a number of years) that I have been a MR member. I personally think that this has little to do with the nomination categories, nomination process, or voting process. I think that it is more to do with the success of ebooks. That is the growth of ebook readership and the parallel growth of alternative sites to MR. Including sites for book discussion.
So anyway that's a few more of my thoughts to toss into this free for all discussion. I still like the idea of Tom being a benevolent dictator for the book nominations.
