Here's my take on what themes should be:
- Open enough to allow most any genre to be nominated
- Constrained enough to make us think about our nominations
- Defined enough that we get a complementary set of nominations
Obviously, the amount of definition/constraints will vary from month to month but that's how I try to think of them.
Here are a couple that I've been thinking about.
First, one I mentioned last year. We generally need a good, light-hearted (or at least light-weight) option near the Holidays. So I was thinking of "
Tasty Morsels, short and/or sweet". That should cover short stories, food related books, "feel good" (sweet) books, etc. And the title reminds me of the holidays in general.
Along similar lines was "
A Box of Chocolates, custom collections". The idea was "short story collections." It could be a single author, an anthology with different authors around a theme, or potentially even a collection that the NOMINATOR puts together. (I've considered putting together a nomination of 3-5 short stories from online sources and public domain works in the past.) But, as Forrest says "You never know what you're gonna get."
A different one was "
First Things First, debut books", with the intention of getting the first book by an author. Although, the first book in a series would certainly be appropriate as well.
Also, I still think we need to find a time to use "Crunchy and Goes well with Ketchup".
