1. Last week's FMK winner was Lumberjanes! It was a close-fought battle between it and Code Name Verity, but Verity siphoned off a lot more M votes, so Lumberjanes took it.

None of the frontrunners for K had a majority of K votes, but a couple of the overall-low-scoring ones did, and they were books I was planning to read and dump anyway, so they may just go.

I haven't finished any more this week because -

2. I got my intoabar fic posted, just under deadline! I say "posted" not "finished", because it's supposed to have 2.5 more scenes, but between not getting the new canon until the middle of the week it was due, and a beach emergency (beach emergency here defined as "it was the last weekend before nonresident use fees go into effect for season and also the first sunny day after a week straight of rain"), I was writing right up against the deadline, and apparently I am now too old to keep writing up until 3 AM when I have to be at work the next morning.

I haven't put it on AO3 yet, but the community post is Lacunae: Highlander/Murderbot Diaries.

Hopefully I will get another couple thousand words written, and then post a version I am happier about to AO3, but it may be a little while because -

3. I went with a bunch of friends went to see Deadpool 2 last weekend. I never saw Deadpool 1, because ultraviolence is not my thing, and Deadpool is a character who in theory I enjoy, but in practice would immediately dump me into needing to read a pile of comics that I actively dislike. But the movie does seem to have managed to pull out all the reasons I want to like Deadpool and change all the reasons I don't, and it was really well done, so now I am reading Deadpool fanfic?

I am glad there's a nice backlog of Deadpool/Cable still out there from before they got divorced, though, because all the recent stuff seems to be Deadpool/Peter Parker and I'm not really feeling that right now. I've been hanging out mostly with the Avengers lately, though, and I'd forgotten how... X-Men X-Men fandom gets.

So anyway--

4. I am apparently writing movieverse Deadpool mpreg now.

Hold Me Closer, Tiny Dancer (4318 words) by melannen
Relationships: Vanessa Carlysle/Wade Wilson
Additional Tags: Mpreg, Fluff, Grief/Mourning, Found Family, Team, not post-credits-scene compliant, not reality compliant, content warning: deadpool, but all the really bad stuff is just referenced, except the vomit so much, Vomiting, I'm pretty sure Wade is reading these tags so I'm not going into detail in them
Summary: "That's stage four, depression," Al said, sitting on his ankles and chewing very loudly on her sandwich. "But I don't know how the hell you'd tell the difference with you. Besides, vomiting isn't any stage of grief." She thought that over, then added, "Except for the stage that comes after the drinking stage, but you already did that one."

Possibly there will be more chapters - I have another 3000 words already written, and it will take at least another 4000 to get to the part where Wade and Yukio go shopping for cute maternity dresses - but on the other hand, the chances of me hanging onto character voice for a movie I've seen once long enough to write multiple chapters is... low, and that came to a good stopping point, so I posted it complete and guess I will see how getting fanfic posted on the first week of a new movie feels.

Anyway, I shouldn't be doing that because -

5. I'm going on vacation next week! A week in the country with probably minimal internet access. Hopefully I will get many books read and much writing done. But in the meantime I have SO MUCH TO DO before I leave, I don't need Wade Wilson suddenly in my head all the time >:|

HAH I bet you thought I'd given up on these!

Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh is very long, and also, frankly, not an enjoyable experience so far, so it's taking awhile. I'm only 2/5 of the way through but I want to write up my impressions at this point because it might take me another while to finish, and I think (hope?) I might have a very different impression once I'm done, and also I find myself with a lot to say already. (Also this is going to be at least half about Imperial Radch anyway, sorry-not-sorry.)

The main thing is that this book is GRIM. And DARK. I don't know that it's all the way to grimdark, but so far it's pretty much completely lacking in hope. Or happiness. Or fun. I know I have a lot of readers who really like Alliance-Union, and I can see why, because it's objectively a very good book, it's just... a grindingly awful experience for everyone involved, including me. It drops you in at the everything-is-lost low point of a three-act play, and then it just gets worse from there.

But I am glad I'm reading it, if only because it's so very very clear that this was an influence on later mil-SF, including parts of Imperial Radch, and particularly, I may have made a mistake starting it right after a re-read of Ancillary Sword, because the parallels in the setup are so blatantly obvious that way: the military ship arriving unannounced at the previously-theoretically-neutral Station, bringing unwanted tidings of war and disaster; the overcrowded station, the cut-off but inhabited section like a tourniquet around a necrotic limb; the system that is important because it has the capacity to be self-supporting with all the trade lines down, but is going to have to scramble to become so in time; even the leader adopting a powerless personage of complicated loyalties and a troubling history of hamhanded brainwashing.

( Read more... )

So yeah. Other than the hisa, I don't really have anything very bad to say for it. Except that it's just relentlessly, grindingly no fun.

Last week's F winner was the Tiptree, but commenters were unaminous that it is the wrong Tiptree to start with, so now I'm undecided whether to let than win or to fallback to second place ("Empire of Bones"). There was also a tie for K, and I broke it in favor of the one with the less boring title, so Castaways of Tanagar goes away.

Also, I missed that the last poll was the one-year anniversary of FMK! Folks, I have been doing this since last February, and with that in mind, it's not that bad that I only have 18 still in the backlog to read. Right? Right. (It also means that if I'd managed a poll a week, as originally planned, we would now be done! Instead there are about three months' worth left. Oops.)

(I am considering what to do if I finish this. Options include: stop already; start over again with the Ms; poll one section of the Dewey Decimal System a week in my 1200 NF unreads; or read & review all my unread comics, which would probably not require voting because there's only a couple hundred of them and they read fast.)

Anyway, since I finally finished the cat mysteries books, it's time for Mysteries 2: History Mysteries!

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

( Poll: Blair, Buckley, Christie, Collins, Corby, Hahn, Hammet, Little, Mosley, Queen, Roe, Sayers, Zelazny, etc. )

So I read the one you voted on last week, and I'm almost finished another one! And I even did the canon review for the exchange fic that y'all decided to make me be responsible about (and even wrote the fic already, whooo.) At this rate, I may make up the backlog before we're finished with voting.

This week: I Have Never Read Anything By This Person, Not Even A Social Media Post

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

( Poll: Benford, Sheckley, Shedley, Sheffield, Simak, Siodmak, Spinrad, Stableford, Steele, Taber, Timlett, Tiptree, Varley, Weiner, Wells, Williams, Williamson, Zakour )

Look, it's an FMK response! I bet you forgot those existed! I almost did!

The good news is, my copy (a 1950s vintage paperback "Best Seller Classics" edition featuring a bright green "handsome leatherette cover") survived me reading it! The leatherette cover was actually more protective than expected (it's fully waterproof, don't ask me why I now know that) and I enjoyed it as a physical object enough that I might keep it even if I'd hated the text.

But I did not hate the text! Kipling remains a very good writer - the music in his poetry comes through in his prose and I love that he's so unashamed about letting his language be baroquely beautiful.

Somehow I had managed to miss the fact that the Jungle Book is an anthology rather than a novel until I actually started reading it, so if you, like me, had not realized this, there are three Mowgli stories, one story about a seal, and some stories about domesticated animals under the British Raj in India, interspersed with poems related to the stories. The Mowgli stories and poems were by far the best.

rushthatspeaks said in the original poll comments that "The Jungle Book is Kipling's least-racist work in which POC appear. I am aware that this is extremely faint praise, and it is intended to be," and that's a pretty accurate summation on that front. (Also, I found the Mowgli stories better than the others race-wise, but that's probably just because no white people appear in them, so without context you can pretend that he's disparaging all humans in comparison to the jungle, rather than Indian culture in particular.)

It's been a long, long, long time since I've seen the Jungle Book movie, but I think I liked the stories in comparison to them. Mowgli's life in the jungle, and particularly his problems navigating between his birth culture and the one where he was raised, are addressed in a actually fairly complicated way! As is the way the jungle creatures accommodate and adapt to the human settlements constantly encroaching on their homes. Also, at no point does it imply that sexual attraction to women is the fundamental thing makes you a human being, so that's good.

Also, I really liked that Bagheera, in the books, was raised by humans. I don't remember that coming up in the movies, but it makes his relationship with Mowgli even more interesting. (Also, if you came out of watching a movie version shipping Bagheera/Baloo, well, yeah, that's there in the book too. What is it with adventure stories giving their main character two dads who love each other very much? Minimizes the yucky female influence in their childhood, I guess?)

On the other stories - the one about the elephant dance was by far the most racist. The one about the seal was interesting, as a viewpoint on extinction via overhunting far earlier than most people think about it, and also I do believe in a secret enclave of Steller's Sea Cows somewhere in the North Pacific, I do I do. The one about the warhorses was mostly interesting as a view of what war was like when armies were at least half animals, which is becoming forgotten these days, really. If there were others they did not make enough of an impression that I remember them.

Seeing the influence these stories have had - not just on generations of children's literature, but on generations of English-speaking children - was really interesting, too. Reading the story about the war-horses, I felt less like I was getting a glimpse of a 19th century army in India, and more like I was getting a glimpse into the imaginary inner lives of hundreds of British children in cold stuffy nurseries for generation after generation, and that was its own sort of absorbing experience. (I'm sure the handsome leatherette cover helped with that, too.)

So part of the original point of FMK (other than "having an excuse to chat about old SF with my reading list") was to reduce choice paralysis when I was trying to decide what to read by narrowing it down a little. And, of course, I'm now far enough behind that I'm getting choice paralysis just with unread FMK books.

Last week's F winner was tied between the Lee and the Huff, so I'm picking "Tales From The Flat Earth" because a) it had fewer M votes and b) I've already read the rest of the series, so I'm not going to end up with a bunch more on my to-read list either way.

The K winner was the "Free Lancers" collection ft. Drake and Card (and also a Bujold novella, which I think is why I bought that one, but I've already read the Bujold one and I think I've picked it up in another collection since then. So yeah, probably time to K that one.)

Anyway, this week we're doing a special poll where instead of giving you a new list of books, I'm re-listing the F books that I haven't read yet and you get to vote on which one I should read next! Yay! I'll rank them by number of votes and read them in that STRICT order, that should solve the choice problem. (And if I get to one and just don't want to, I guess that answers the "do I need to keep it" question.)


Bonus Round:

Last week's F winner - in a close-fought battle with Hambly - was Patricia Wrede's The Seven Towers. The K winner was the Stasheff. Y'all really hate Stasheff!

The bad news is, I still haven't finished reading anything. The good news is, it's the end of January and I'm only seven books behind on my Goodreads challenge!

In the interest of getting even farther behind, this week's theme is Omnibi.

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

( Poll: Anderson, Bear, Blish, Bova, Brackett, Brust, Busby, Cherryh, Harrison, Huff, Lee, Leiber, McIntyre, McKillip, O'Donnell, Robinson, Scarborough, Zebrowski )

Last week's F winner was "We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea", so I guess I will be finding out if I still like Swallows & Amazons. The most K votes was Hatchet with six, but Hatchet also had a lot of M and F votes, and actually nothing had a K majority last week - the closest was Anna Smudge with 4 F, 1 M, and 5 K.

My excuse for not reading anything this week is that I've been reading various translation of the Tao Te Ching instead, because Star Wars reasons. [Back me up, people: the world does not need an edition of the Force Powers Codex that has the translation produced by Finn, Rey, Threepio, and Ghost!Luke (which translates 道 as "Force") parallel with the translation produced by Artoo, BB8, Poe, and Ghost!Han (which translates 道 as "this shit we're talking about")]

Anyway, this week, in honor of Jedi Knights: Sword & Sorcery!

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

( Poll: Boyer, Bulmer, Camp, Carter, Cook, Fox, Hambly, Howard, McCulley, Shahar, Stasheff, Stirling, Wrede, Zelazny )

Last week's F winner was the Asimov! The K winner was a multiple-item tie, but the Hamilton had the least number of non-K votes, so it goes.

Over the weekend, instead of catching up on my reading, I wrote a javascript toy that lets me take any arbitrary list and rank it using pairwise comparisons. I feel like this was a good life choice and thus I can tell you that my subconscious definitely, clearly, mathematically provably wants this week's poll to be kids' chapter books.

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

( Poll: Adler, Alcock, Arthur, Babbitt, Cushman, Hildick, Hinton, Howe, Kinney, Konigsburg, Korman, Kroeber, Leeds, Lindgren, MAC, Paulsen, Ransome, Regan, Sutcliff, Townsend )

All right. FMK. Where were we? (Not on Tuesday, apparently.)

I have not read any new FMK books since the last time we had a poll, alas. I did a bunch of re-reading for Yuletide and a bunch of reading comics trades to try to make my Goodreads goal at the last minute (I was ten books down for the year after reading twenty on New Year's Eve. I blame FMK.) And then made the mistake of checking out more library books. On the plus side, I got less than ten new books for Christmas this year, which I think is a record. \o/

I did finally read the newest Young Wizards book, Games Wizards Play. I'd started it a few times and put it down because I was bored, which I did not like, because that's one of my favorite series, so I was afraid to try reading it again, but I finally blew through it for Yuleitde background, and I will admit to continuing to be bored most of the way through. Also I really, really don't like the increasing emphasis on wizarding dynasties and wizardry being primarily heritable. And I am so beyond tired of token ace characters showing up in YA just to cheerfully explain that just because they don't like sex doesn't mean they can't fall in love! It did redeem itself by a) sneaking an explicit sex scene into a series still marketed as junior-grade (There were orbital resonances!) and b) the revelation that DD has moved on to just blatantly trolling her fanbase on the question of Tom/Carl.

I have a lot of anthologies left, so this week is another anthology week! These are all single-author SF anthologies. Some of them are authors where I've read and liked their novels, some of them are classic authors where I haven't read much and felt like I needed a sampler. Hopefully I am correct about what kind of anthologies these are...

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

( Poll: Anvil, Asimov, Atwood, Bradbury, Clarke, Foster, Hamilton, Heinlein, Lackey, Le Guin, Lee, Lovecraft, Pohl, Pratchett, Resnick, Russell, Silverberg, Van Vogt, Zelazny )

Sorry, all! I think I am going to declare a hiatus on FMK polls at least until the YT deadline - I am super behind on writing reviews and reading as it is, and I really need to not get distracted from [redacted] until then. We are exactly 2/3 of the way through! And I promise I will bring it back once my YT fic is posted!

Meanwhile I will try to catch up on FMK reviews and maybe even post some non-FMK stuff????

First up: Thor: Ragnarok: super fun, there has not been nearly enough Valkyrie/Bruce/Hulk fic being posted yet. And I keep kind of going *headtilt* at ( all the commentary about it being anticolonialist )

Also I can't make the demographics of Asgard make ANY SENSE. Is the entire on-planet population of Asgard supposed to be on that ship with Thor? Because there were AT MOST 2000 people crossing the Bridge. Which is pretty much in line with the population size we see in the comics, but that says really specific things about how Asgard's culture and its empire work; "King over less people than went to my high school and some vassals in other lands" frankly sets him well below Tony Stark in real power even before Ragnarok. Or were there still people in the city at the end and Thor and Loki just killed them all? That actually makes more sense in terms of the movie's timeline - because there were still a lot of people there when Hela discovered the location of the hideaway, and the time-gap between that and when everyone was on the bridge was at most an hour or so, which was not enough to finish a larger evacuation. But the emotional note of the ending was really, really not "we just killed a bunch of our own people."

Fanfic seems to be split on whether they saved most of the civilians or killed most of them. What do y'all think?

I mean, the real answer is probably "they didn't want computer-generated crowd scenes and you can only handle so many extras". And I did think the way they seem to have used computer animation only for the stuff that really needed it was pretty cool - the fact that I looked at the crowd scenes and though "oh, they ran out of extras" somehow made the amazing floating space city they were in *more* real, because my mind was reading it as an on-location shoot. Which was pretty cool.

Last week's RF winner was Black Ships by Jo Graham! I am legitimately excited to read this one, although the F pile is getting really high. :/ I have been writing this month for November/Yuletide and that always makes me less likely to pick up a fiction book.

The K winner was Old Man's War, but that was also 3rd place for F with a majority of F votes, so I'm reprieving it. 2nd place was a four-way tie between Illuminatus!, Homeland, The Thirteenth Child, and the Lovecraft anthology. I guess the internet had opinions on Books The Internet Has Opinions On! The Lovecraft had by far the fewest non-K votes, so it gets to go.

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

This week's theme: Culturally Diverse Authors, non-SF edition.


( Poll: Abe, Abraham, Aidoo, Aleichem, Alexie, Ba, Dangarembga, Emecheta, Gordimer, Larsen, Murasaki, Thiong'o, Park, Ryan, Wallis, anthologies )

The mysteries F winner was the cat detectives. I am shocked, I tell you, shocked. I have already read one of the stories in it, and there were not nearly as many cats as advertised. :( The K winner was the Garrison Keillor, which is helpful because it means I don't have to keep wondering if I want to read it or not, you people have informed me I don't.

I have not read any other new FMK this week because I have been catching up on comics and other stuff. Also I saw Thor 3! That was an EPICALLY silly movie. I approve. EPICALLY silly is the only register in which Marvel Thor stuff ever works and they don't hit it nearly as often as I'd wish.

Today's is a mixed batch on the rather nebulous theme of Someone On The Internet Said I Should Read This. Will the internet contradict itself? Let's find out!

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

( Poll: Butler, Doctorow, Eager, Graham, Hines, Hodgell, Juster, Lovecraft, Pierce, Renault, Russell, Scalzi, Shea & Wilson, Tolkien, Wrede )

I finished Han of Iceland! Just in time to get it back to the library! It turned out to not be as long as I thought, because despite the fact that the cover, front matter, and library catalog entries all said just Hans of Iceland, it was actually part of a Complete Victor Hugo and also contained Bug-Jargal.

Possibly longer review coming later, but if I did in fact own a copy, it would be a definite M at this point. Just note that there is a scene where Hans is fighting a wolf bare-handed when the wolf is suddenly also attacked by a giant polar bear, so he has to pause fighting the wolf to chase off the bear so he can come back and kill the wolf ALL BY HIMSELF. In a gloomy cave full of pagan idols.

(Also everybody except the corrupt nobles lives happily ever after! including the defeated rebel leaders!)

Now that I'm through that and also through a lot of my other library books backlog (I have read Provenance! It was good! Mercy of Kalr needs some spider mechs!) I should be able to start catching up on the FMK backlog again.

Last week's K winner was the Dr. Strangelove novelization. Should be fun! The F winner was actually Mockingjay, which I did not expect that much hate for. I think I am going to exercise my discretion and K the second-place instead, Alph, which was universally agreed to be terrible by everybody who had heard of it.

It's week #30 already! Time for MYSTERIES. I actually had enough random mystery novels lying around that there will be two, maybe three weeks of mysteries. (This is mostly the fault of work.)

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

( Poll: Andrews, Andrews, Beaton, Burke, DeSilva, Gazan, Goldenbaum, Hess, Hill, Keillor, King, Anthology )

Han of Iceland is due back to the library in a week and I can't renew it anymore. :/ I'm just over 1/3 of the way through. Four chapters ago, Hans snuck up on Spaguidry and did something offscreen that involved a lot of screaming, but meanwhile we've had many pages of Ethel's dad failing to recognize that the person he is talking to is also the person he is talking about (not even any disguises required! he just wouldn't stop talking long enough to allow an introduction, and by the time he did, it was just awkward), some revolutionaries conspiring over a bonfire, and many many pages of Ordener mooning over the distant light in Ethel's window.

I have hopes for onscreen violence before much longer, though.

Last week's F winner was Sly Mongoose by Tobias Buckell, and K was Better to beg forgiveness.... In other good news, I went through the boxes of fmk-eligible books as part of my "clean everything" project, and thanks to ya'll, we have gone from six boxes + a small shelf + overflow to no more overflow! \o/ (And so far, all the fmk keepers have managed to fit into existing space on the keeper shelves.)

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

This week's theme: It's Halloween, so let's do something proper scary: OUR INEVITABLE SLIDE INTO DYSTOPIA

( Poll: Burgess, Butler, Collins, Dixon, George, Huxley, Karig, Maine, More, Pohl & Kornbluth, Steinbeck, Wibberley, Zamyatin )

So last week's winners, 14 to 15, were Adventures of Sally for F and Breakfast at Tiffany's for K; those were probably the two best-known of the lot, so I don't know what I expected.

I haven't been reading much fmk lately between a backlog of library books, a massive pile of comic trades that fell into my hands, and finding yuletide canon to review after all, but I will get back onto it soon! (Also because the next one I need to finish is Han of Iceland but it's just. so bad.)

Also one of the trades was Kingsman, so I have been reading novel-length Kingsman fic, and it is SO WEIRD that they ship Eggsy with his mentor when the basic plot of the comic and movie seems to be otherwise pretty much the same. X|

This week: I think it's military SF? The label I used for it was smilsf, but I am not sure why the S is there. So if some of these aren't actually milsf, blame Past Me.

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

( Poll: Bova, Buckell, Coppel, Cruz, Haldeman, Kent, Lupoff, Norton, Russel, Williamson )

Last week's winners were not what I expected! But F goes to The Red Tent and K goes to The Magicians (which is WAY more hated than I had realized! For good reason apparently.)

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

This week's theme: I have no idea what this book is about, I'm pretty sure I only have it for the title.

( Poll: Bail, Capote, Carey, Collins, Connors, Corliss, Ericson, Galloway, Gould, Morse, Shann, Shreve, Townsend, Wodehouse )

( Asterix le Gaulois/Asterix the Gaul by Goscinny and Uderzo )

( Truckers by Terry Pratchett )

( The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch )


So halfway in, here are our stats:

( Read more... )

Okay, enough of that, now onto the yuletide letter polishing.... My yuletide match this year did not require any extra canon review? WHAT AM I GOING TO READ FOR THE NEXT MONTH? Oh right, those 7 fmk up there.

#26! The projected halfway point of a year's worth of reading the backlog! And in fact I went in over the last couple weeks and sorted all of the remaining into piles, so I didn't end up stuck with just a bunch of boring mismatched ones toward the end, and it looks like it might actually come out to exactly 52 weeks without me having to try too hard?

It looks like there will be more non-spec-fic weeks coming up, though, I ended up with 8 more weeks worth of that. I know fewer of you get excited about those but that's what I have on my shelves. There's also four more anthology weeks.

This week's anthologies also did not garner a huge number of votes. I will reiterate you don't have to know anything about the books to vote! A lot of these I bought just 'cause I liked the title so you do not have to feel bad if you vote that way. I suspect last week's voting was on that basis, given that it was a dead heat between Carmen Miranda's ghost is haunting space station three and Brave New Girls: Girls and Gadgets. Brave New Girls won F in the end! Cats In Space won K. Surely... surely ya'll don't have something about Cats in Space? I read all the Catfantastics back in the day; I will have to at least check that one to see how much overlap there is.

I finally finished Locke Lamora, so I have three reviews to get through; IDK if I'll do that first, or a proper yuletide letter...

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

For the midway point, we have a very special theme this week: PEOPLE GETTING PAID PRO RATES FOR FANFIC! Hoorah!

( Poll: Anderson, de Camp, Diamant, Fraser, Grossman, Lewis, Maguire, Maney, McCullough, Murphy, Niven, Scalzi, Stevenson, anthologies )

Last week's F winner was The Jungle Book! I am looking forward to it, even though I will probably have "The Bare Necessities" stuck in my head the whole time. Also, it is short! (Or at least my copy is. If it turns out to be abridged I'm just going to go with it anyway.

The K winner was Shardik. It's been a bad month for Richard Adams here in FMK land. Good month for freeing up space, though!

I'm still slowly working on Locke Lamora. I did start to get pretty invested during Part Two, and then... the fridging happened. UGH.

Between that and Hans of Iceland I have enough long books on my plate right now, and also I kind of don't want to live on this planet right now, so for number 25: Space Anthologies! (There will probably be more anthology weeks coming, because I've been trying to avoid mixing them with novels, but I have a LOT of anthologies. I think in the last cull I preferentially saved them with the idea that if I just wanted to get a taste of a genre or an author's work, and anthology made more sense than Book #4 of a series.)

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

( Poll: Editors including Ackerman, Asimov, Dozois, Drake, Fan, Fawcett, Greenberg, Hartwell, Sakers, Scithers )