So if you think of a book as a lump of clay or a block of wood that starts out not at all shaped like an elephant, and you have to mold or cut away everything that doesn't look like an elephant until you get the finished product (and bear with me as I horribly butcher my metaphors), then Alexandra Quick and the Stars Above now looks an awful lot like an elephant.

However, the hide still needs a few more wrinkles, and I haven't quite decided yet if it's an African elephant or an Asian elephant. (It's the ears.)

( Author rambling and semi-confidence, a sneak preview (not), and a release date! )

calico_reaction pointed me to the Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2012.

This is perfect for me. I have so many books lying around that I've been meaning to get to "someday." So I am taking up the challenge, and counting only books that I actually own, as physical print books, right now.

I am setting a modest goal of Mt. Vancouver (25 books), since I will still be doing my books1001 thing next year (we aren't even close to halfway done with the list yet), and of course I want to reserve some slots for books I haven't scheduled or been "assigned." But if I get all the way through my 25 books early, I may go for Mt. Ararat (40 books) as I'll still have dozens of unread books on my shelves.

So, here are the books that are actually, physically, literally in my TBR pile right now which I am going to read in 2012.

( My TBR reading challenge list for 2012 )

Anyone else want to join?

[Poll #1799636]

(And if you answer "yes" to the poll, back it up and sign up at the MY READER'S BLOCK link above.

But good luck to the rest of you. I am going to try to finish the first edit of AQATDR by the end of the month. That's my writing goal for November.

[Poll #1792122]

At any given time I have several queues of TBR books (don't ask -- it's my own system, mixing formats and where I read and fiction or non-fiction, etc.). But anyway, I have a literal stack of fiction books waiting to be read and I can't decide which one to read next. So I throw it out to my flist: what do you want to see reviewed next? (No, there are no write-in votes, I'm trying to shrink my TBR stack!)



[Poll #1791117]

ETA: &*@$%#! I misspelled "anthology" and you can't edit a poll after it's been posted.

ETA 2: Battle Royale it is! Don't worry, I will get to the others in due time.

So I am thinking of commissioning some more character illustrations, but this time of the secondary characters. AQ fans, vote for the character you would most like to see drawn by someone who's not me.

[Poll #1779152]

First, the tiny, petty rant:

For some reason, Yahoo!Mail is not playing nicely with Firefox. I can log in, but it takes forever to actually get to my inbox and be able to read messages. I suspect it's because Yahoo! has done something that Noscript and/or Adblock Plus doesn't like. Is anyone else having similar issues? MSIE logs in and retrieves mail just fine. But when I log into Yahoo!Mail with IE, and then click review links to MNFF, I am reminded just how much the Internet sucks without Firefox + NoScript + Adblocker. Everything is all annoying, flashing banners!

(Yes, the obvious solution is to not use Yahoo!Mail. I actually don't for any of my "real" email, but my Y! address is where all my fanfic-related stuff goes.)

Inverarity's School of Literary Analysis

Traditionally, fiction is said to be composed of five elements: Characters, Setting, Plot, Theme, and Style. There are other interpretations; "Style," for example, is sometimes referred to as Point-of-View, but that ignores everything about the writing style except the choice of first-vs-second-vs-third person limited-vs-omniscient, etc. Some lists include Conflict as a separate element, but I regard that as part of the Plot. And you can find other lists that break it down into slightly different ways, but I'm going to stick with these five.

So, I was wondering why some people hate certain authors that others love, and why you can look on Amazon or GoodReads and find two people who are both seemingly intelligent, thoughtful, critical reviewers with similar tastes, and one will give a book one star and another will give the same book five stars. Obviously, sometimes it's just going to be quirks of the individual and/or the book: I really hated a certain plot twist that someone else likes, or a character that I love totally gets on another reader's nerves. Predicting tastes and value judgments is a tricky business (and one that has big money behind it: Netflix is still only mediocre at predicting how I'll rate a given movie, and I find that Amazon's recommendations are usually at least in the ballpark of what I like to read, but their algorithm can also produce wildly inappropriate suggestions.)

Anyway, I propose the following theory: there are three kinds of readers.

Like any theory that attempts to sort everyone in the world into one of three categories, this is not to be taken too seriously, but humor me. I'm actually working on this as a paradigm for future book reviews, so feel free to give your input. (Also, I apply the same judgments to fan fiction.)

( What kind of reader are you? )

Read the stuff inside the cut for an explanation; yes, you must choose one. Pretend I'm holding a gun to your head. :P

[Poll #1543927]