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If I'm not mistaken, all of our nominations this month are first-time nominations for the book clubs here, which is terrific. The nominations also represent eight different decades and seven different countries.
One thing that hadn't occurred to me until now is that I've been slowly watching one of the queerest television series ever these last few months and I just realised how well it related to our monthly category. The series in question is Twin Peaks: The Return which is without a doubt the strangest series I've ever seen, and overflowing with queer characters. I'm also reminded of one other series called The League of Gentlemen which was also full of very unusual characters, but it was more purposely over-the-top comedy so I think Twin Peaks easily edges it out as strangest series for its quasi-realistic seriousness and subtler humour mixed with such unusualness.
As I was reading the preview for Passing Strange I thought, hmm, it's odd that the preview prologue isn't anything like what I was expecting, being about a black woman in the 1800s who married a white man in NYC. I thought perhaps this would be the ancestors of a main character who moves to San Francisco. Well, after I finished the sample and was pretty confused, I looked again and realised I'd read the sample for another book called Passing Strange, lol. I'd gone to Amazon to get the preview and the other Passing Strange was listed first in the results (I didn't include author's name) and I just read it without considering that it might not be the correct one, heh.
The only other nomination I'll comment on right now is The Little Prince, which I've wanted to read for ages. I'd actually been saving it to read as my first book in French once my French was good enough, but my learning of the language is so slow and scattershot that I'm not sure when I'll ever get there, so now is as good a time as any to read the book (and if it wins, I'll read it in English, heh).
I'm going to spread my nominations out very evenly this month because I liked all the previews and would be happy with any of them. Since I can't vote for all, I decided to choose the one not to vote for based on which one seemed the least queer, which was difficult since they all seem to be in their way. But if it comes down to it, I wasn't sure just how odd the actual characters are in Troubles even though their circumstances and surroundings seem quite unusual, so even though it's my own nomination it's the one I'm leaving off though I'd still be very happy if it won. Thus my votes are:
-1 to Eva Luna
-1 to Passing Strange
-1 to Unreliable Memoirs
-1 to The Little Prince
-1 to Flatland
-1 to Titus Groan
-1 to Observatory Mansions
-1 to The Family Fang
-1 to The Rabbit Back Literature Society
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