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This was possibly the hardest month for me in terms of narrowing it down to three nominations. I had it down to four and I could not decide which one to leave out. The unfortunate fourth was Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata. It's by a Nobel winner and is about a geisha near a hot spring in the very snowy mountainous west of Japan where people come to holiday. While geishas in other parts of Japan may have a higher status, in this area they are seen as quite lowly, barely above prostitutes. She falls for a man with a family back home who is travelling there and this is the story of their doomed love. The preview was fantastic and the descriptions of the landscape and snow really evoke a 'winter wonderland' feeling, including a description at the start of the mountain tunnel the train must pass through to get to this area which is always under threat of an avalanche with thousands of men always on the ready to dig it out if the need arises.
If I had chosen to eliminate one of the four I was considering based on length, or having less of a straightforward narrative, or having less of a wintery feel in the preview, or Goodreads ratings, each of the others would've been left out instead depending on the criteria, and I did consider all that. I also thought about nominating diverse titles (which would've left out one of the ones with 'winter' in the title), having a foreign language nomination, having a nomination from a wider variety of years (Snow Country was published in 1948), etc. I even noticed only one author was male, but as if the tables were turned I wouldn't include a female author just because she was the only I was considering, I didn't consider that. I also know AnotherCat likes Japanese lit and Bookworm_Girl is interested in the Kawabata, but I felt they would be interested in the other three for various reasons too so I didn't let that sway me either way.
In the end, I chose to not nominate the one that had been nominated here before. Snow Country had been nominated a few years ago (and almost won with only one vote separating it from the winner) while the other three are all fresh to the club. There really was no best reason to settle on for leaving one of the four out; that just happened to be the one I settled on. In a different hour it could've been a different decision with any of the other reasons I'd mentioned.
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