Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
We've done that before and that's why some of us are putting up pre-made lists because the results were far from optimal.
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True, except for the fact that we have not done that before.
For 2010-2011, pilotbob* ended up choosing the categories in a thread similar to this. For 2012 we did a month by month nomination/voting method that took forever and took way too much effort. Last year I tried to listen to too many different opinions on how to choose the list and made it so confusing that we ended up keeping the 2012 choices (my fault, I should have made the options simpler).
And looking back at that history, I am wondering if we can't all continue to post our lists and let our Grand Muckity-Muck make a command decision after looking at them. We know we aren't going to get consensus anyway and I think WT Sharpe could give us a better (more equitable, balanced, etc.) list than just a plain vote by doing something similar.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
That idea is no going to work well. It still leads to some of the problems we have now. One of the problems is these rather old books being nominated. There are a lot of people who would rather read something more modern and that is why (IMHO) some do not participate because we aren't reading enough modern books.
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Which is why I suggested removing some of the "literary" categories like "Award Winners" and "Banned/Challenged" which look good on paper, but don't work as well in practice (IMO).
Also, since we are discussing this so early in the year, if we do a poll we can afford to leave it open for a month or more which would hopefully let many more people vote on categories they would actually read. Hopefully that would draw more people here. I will end up having a link in my signature to the poll to try and advertise it more.
Note: I added a 30th option to the list "Westerns". This was suggested in the 2010 thread and had some traction, so I added it to round out the options.
* I see that pilotbob also provided a definition of Classic for the club in that thread, "A book that is in the public domain (or older than 50 years or pre-1900, whatever) and still in print."