Literary The MR Literary Club 2015-2016 Categories Vote

[sun surfer]

Help us choose the categories that the MR Literary Club will use to alternate for our July 2015-June 2016 cycle!

The poll will be open for seven days. Within that frame you may vote as early or as late as you like.

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

There will be six winners. In the event of a tie, there will be a three-day single-choice run-off poll. If the run-off also ends in a tie, then we will combine the tied categories and be done with it.

NEW - When the poll ends, bonus votes will be manually added before determining final results. Basically, anyone who has commented in two out of the last six discussion threads is eligible for bonus votes, and everyone eligible will have any votes cast doubled. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to vote if interested in participating in the literary club whether eligible for bonus votes or not, and anyone interested in bonus votes is encouraged to become eligible as it doesn’t take much. Currently eligible:

Spoiler:

BelleZora, Bookpossum, Bookworm_Girl, caleb72, ccowie, desertblues, fantasyfan, Hamlet53, HomeInMyShoes, Lin2412, paola, sun surfer, Synamon

This includes posts in the January to June discussion threads.
*There are a few caveats to eligibility as outlined in this post.
**If anyone feels there is any mistake in eligibility, please let me know before the poll is over. Once the poll ends and the tally with bonus votes added is announced, the results will be final.

~

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.

Another category has been suggested - Journey around the World. This would basically be an open category minus any authors from countries of all previous club selections. List of countries currently ineligible for this category:

Spoiler:

Map in Google Maps

Australia - 2
Kate Grenville
Geraldine Brooks

Austria - 1
Stefan Zweig

Canada - 2
Anne Michaels
John Hemming

China - 1
Jung Chang

Colombia - 1
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Egypt - 1
Naguib Mahfouz

France - 1
Henri Barbusse

Germany - 1
Thomas Mann

Ireland - 3
Colm Toibin
Frank O'Connor
George Bernard Shaw

Israel - 1
Amos Oz

Italy - 2
Alessandro Baricco
Dante

Japan - 2
Haruki Murakami
Yukio Mishima

Nigeria - 1
Chinua Achebe

Norway - 1
Henrik Ibsen

Philippines - 1
Jose Rizal

Poland - 1
Joseph Conrad

Russia - 3
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Mikhail Bulgakov

Turkey - 1
Orhan Pamuk

United Kingdom - 14
Evelyn Waugh
G K Chesterton
Vera Brittain
Patrick Leigh Fermor
Lytton Strachey
Anthony Trollope
Siegfried Sassoon
David Mitchell
Jane Austen
George Eliot
Kazuo Ishiguro
Saki
E M Forster
Charles Dickens

United States - 9
E L Doctorow
T S Eliot
Willa Cather
James Welch
Ernest Hemingway
Dawn Powell
Walt Whitman
Laura Hillebrand
Vladimir Nabokov

Categories have been arranged alphabetically and listed in the poll, where half will be voted in for our next yearly cycle and half will languish.

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

[sun surfer]

I'd like to campaign for the Poetry category to make it. First, it might not be everybody's favourite, but the category is almost by definition literary and is tailor-made for a literary club. Second, it's the only category that we've had every year in the same month since the club's inception. Third, many other categories have crossover but it's rare that poetry is nominated or wins in any other category, including rotating months. So, because of its literary-ness and uniqueness I hope it wins a slot in the next line-up.

[Bookpossum]

Good luck with your campaign sun surfer! I do enjoy poetry (and was delighted that my nomination of "Four Quartets" was the choice last time) but I understand how individual a taste poetry can be, and absolutely not to the taste of many people. However, the voting system should make all plain before long.

[HomeInMyShoes]

Can I ask that my vote only count once. I am not more important than anyone else whether they just found us or not.

I am supporting poetry so that we can finally get around to reading Birthday Letters.

I didn't support Journey Around the World one as we should finish the regions as they stand now. I will say that broadening our horizons into other areas is always a good goal to have and I hope people keep the list of where you usually read in mind when looking for books to nominate.

I also think we should finish up the time period category as it stands.

My votes are influenced by trying to include categories I would really like to see included, and also eliminating categories I really would prefer by not voting for these.

I really like the Journey around the World idea because:

• It seems more likely to really broaden the reading selection to cultures other than European, or even Anglo (to which I would include Great Britain, the US, Canada, and Australia) than has been accomplished with the current region category. &
  
• Use of geographic (placement on the globe) to form categories leads to grouping such as India with other South Asian nations when I would rate the difference between India and other countries in this area in culture, including literature, more than that between the Anglo countries listed above that are currently considered distinct.

Originally Posted by HomeInMyShoes

I also think we should finish up the time period category as it stands.

I would also like to see the Time Period category retained, but only if it is completed with out reset now that the popular time periods have been given a chance.

I'll admit I don't care for Poetry.

I personally feel that Contemporary literature does not need a separate category given how often it is selected when it fits into any of the other categories, as well as in the rotating nominations. That is contemporary literature is popular enough that it does not need a category to insure a healthy dose of it here.

For similar reasons I don't favor the Open category. Every rotating nomination period is open.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by sun surfer

I'd like to campaign for the Poetry category to make it. First, it might not be everybody's favourite, but the category is almost by definition literary and is tailor-made for a literary club. Second, it's the only category that we've had every year in the same month since the club's inception. Third, many other categories have crossover but it's rare that poetry is nominated or wins in any other category, including rotating months. So, because of its literary-ness and uniqueness I hope it wins a slot in the next line-up.

I voted for Poetry not because I particularly like it but rather the opposite. It's a category that I don't seek out on my own, and the club forces me to give it a chance. Hence I've found some of our reads in this category to be more enjoyable than expected. Also our discussions have helped me better understand how to read and interpret poetry.

[sun surfer]

A little over half a day left to vote!

[caleb72]

I only voted for 3 - Journey Around the World, Regions and Time Period. I liked all of these ideas.

I'm not much for Non-fiction, Biographies, Plays or Poetry (although I like writing poetry, I seldom like to read and discuss poetry).

Like some others, I didn't see much point in Contemporary or Open. I could possibly be ok with Obscure (and maybe should have voted accordingly), but I wouldn't actively vote for Highly Challenging. And I'm not really good at discussing Short works, although I like reading them, so I didn't push that one either.

I really like the rotating nominations though, so I'm not a total Grinch.

[sun surfer]

With bonus votes added in, here are final poll results:

Biography & Memoirs - 9
Contemporary - 5
Highly Challenging - 4
Journey around the World - 14
Non-Fiction - 9
Obscure - 3
Open - 4
Plays - 4
Poetry - 6
Region - 15
Short - 4
Time Period - 14

So the six categories we'll use in the 2015-2016 cycle are: Region, Journey around the World, Time Period, Biography & Memoirs, Non-Fiction and Poetry. Thanks to all who voted!

[Bookpossum]

Well done sun surfer and thanks for the work in getting the show up and running for the coming year. Looking forward to it!