New Reading Poll

This one lists the e-ARC releases (and two print books) for upcoming releases (and one recently released) books that I likely shall be reviewing in the next few weeks.  Will be taking reader votes in consideration when choosing which book to read/review next.  Several promising titles here, including some from a few of the most well-known and recognized writers of the past half-century.

Finally updated the reading poll

It had been over five months since the last month, so I added a new list of 16 likely future reviews (and a silly choice) for your consideration.  You can vote for as many of these as you like.  Almost all will be reviewed in the next month or so, but it'd be nice to see which ones pique your interests the most.

May you choose wisely and be guided by the spirit of the rabid Serbian reading squirrels!

Results of the recent poll on which awards (and their winners) readers are likely to read

Interesting results to the recent poll on various awards (realized too late that I had left off the Shirley Jackson Awards, which do interest me more than some of the others that did make the list):

Nobel Prize in Literature	28 (35%)
Pulitzer Prize	32 (40%)
Man Booker Prize	38 (48%)
Hugo Award	31 (39%)
National Book Awards	8 (10%)
National Book Critics Circle Awards	6 (7%)
Clarke Award	20 (25%)
World Fantasy Award	32 (40%)
Man Asian Prize	6 (7%)
Orange Prize/Women's Prize for Fiction	11 (13%)
Nebula Awards	30 (37%)
Gemmell Awards	9 (11%)
Bram Stoker Awards	19 (24%)
Edgar Awards	8 (10%)
BSFA Awards	13 (16%)
PEN/Faulkner Award	8 (10%)
Whatever award the squirrels give out for fiction/poetry/squirrel worship	21 (26%)

It seems that by a narrow margin, readers prefer three literary awards (Man Booker Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Nobel Prize in Literature) over the top three SF/F genre awards (World Fantasy Award, Hugo Award, Nebula Awards) by an aggregate of 98 to 93 (of course, it's likely that a majority of those votes were for at least one from each of the two classifications).  It was surprising (and quite pleasing) to see that readers here do value awards that squirrels might give out for fiction/poetry/squirrel worship a bit more than the other awards listed above.  Perhaps there is hope for humanity yet.  Slightly disappointed to see more votes for the Gemmell Awards (which I think is more like a glorified internet opinion poll – yes, the irony here is noted) than for the National Book Critics Circle Poll (which has had several excellent shortlists in recent years) or the Man Asian Prize or the PEN/Faulkner Award.  Oh well. 

Ah, internet fan polls!

I missed out on all of the drama associated with the Tor.com Best of 2011 Readers' Poll that concluded recently.  It seems there was a bit of ballot stuffing, if one looks at it from the vantage point of the casual observer, as several authors who are not well-known or best-selling authors seemed to somehow muscle their way onto the Top 10.  Patrick over at Stomping on Yeti covers this in nice detail, so I suggest looking at his blog first before reading the rest of this post.

Let's look at the final vote tallies for the Top 10:

1. The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss (140 votes)
2. The All-Pro by Scott Sigler (105 votes)
3. The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson (63 votes)
4. The Seventh Throne by Stephen Zimmer (63 votes)
5. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (55 votes)
6. The Final Arbiter by Mark Rivera (55 votes)
7. A Dance With Dragons by George R. R. Martin (53 votes)
8. Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi (52 votes)
9. Dancing With Eternity by J.P. Lowrie (50 votes)
10. Among Others by Jo Walton (49 votes)

What struck me about this, considering that the poll ran for at least a week, was the relatively low number of votes for a site such as Tor.com, which seems to have traffic that's likely 100x or more than this blog's (depending on the counter service, I seem to average somewhere around 700-1000 page views/day for the past couple of months).  It's slightly higher than the nominations for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, if I recall (I think some get in under the Top 5 cutoff there with around 40-50 votes, but I could be mistaken), but less than I would expect for a site that probably has more than 5,000 daily visitors (which I think is somewhat more than those who are full or supporting members of the yearly Worldcons).

Now I'm not as certain as Patrick seems to be that there is something corrupt going on.  I could see an author who releases $0.99 Kindle edition stories picking up a readership that flies under the radar of those of us who distrust authors who self-publish (that is, those who have no reputation for quality, as several authors I do enjoy, such as J.M. McDermott and Minister Faust, seem to be experimenting in releasing story collections as e-book exclusives independent of traditional presses).  Scott Sigler is a prime example of that, as he started in a similar fashion and gained a huge readership through podcasts and cheap e-releases, if memory serves.

But this wouldn't lead to a readership in the hundreds of thousands, at least not in 99% of these cases.  But I could see a hyper-loyal fanbase in the low hundreds that follows these authors much more than the majority of Rothfuss, Sanderson, Martin, or Scalzi's fans follow them.  From what I've gathered, none of those authors publicized this poll's existence (after all, is it really going to boost/dent their sales?) and yet the self-published authors on this list seem to have mentioned it on their blogs, Facebook, and/or Twitter and attracted just enough votes to crack the Top 10.  55 votes to make the top 5/6 is a pretty small amount for a forum like Tor.com, after all.

What one could argue, and this is where I found Patrick's chart of Amazon reviews/Tor.com vote to be interesting, is that there is a very large margin of error that could be attributed to evenness of promotion elsewhere, makeup of fanbases, and extremely small sample size.  What reader polls like Tor.com's illustrate is not the books that are necessarily "the best" for a given span, but rather the dynamics of fan interest/awareness playing out across multiple media.  There don't seem to be eliminating factors such as those found (in an imperfect fashion, of course) for the Locus Awards (subscribers get their votes weighted twice as much as non-subscribers, plus there's a provided list that tends to dampen write-in nominations) or even the Gemmell Awards, which I consider to be nigh useless because some elements of "bloc voting" seem to occur there.  What this particular Tor.com poll reveals is just a bunch of fans in separate communities trying to promote their favorite author without much regard to actual quality of the writing.

After all of this e-ink being spilled here stating the near-obvious, I do find myself wondering what would happen if I promoted a similar thing here.  Would anyone be interested in seeing the results to that, provided that if I set up such a poll that I would expect readers to tweet about it, post it on Facebook, or blog about it?  Or is that something best left to non-squirrelists?

New poll up on international coverage

It's been a long time since I ran a poll here, so I thought I'd post one on covering books from non-North American or UK regions/countries.  You can vote for more than one of the choices listed to the right and I'll see what I can do.  I know I'm back in that cycle of reading more books in other languages.  Currently, I'm still re-reading/reviewing past Premio Alfaguara winners, although I might go out of chronological order in order to cover the recently-released 2011 winner and a couple of others that personally appeal to me even more than the high esteem which I have for virtually all the winning books.

In addition, I'm working some on my French and Portuguese, as I just finished reading Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly's Les dialoliques (She-Devils in English) and am alternating this weekend between José Maria Eça de Queiros' A Cidade e as Serras and Brazilian writer Octavio Aragão's A Mão que Cria (which has a strong opening premise; more later, as I did semi-promise Aragão a review).

I do have some Haikasoru books of Japanese SF/F to read in the future, so I might be willing to bump up some of those reads if interest for them is high enough.  Same for the tiny amount of other Asian, Middle Eastern, and African literatures I have.  Eastern European literature is also up for a closer examination, after reading a couple of excellent translations of Hungarian writers recently.  Plus, I do want to revisit some of the Serbian works I have, both in the language and in English translation, as fantasika is a continuing love of mine.

But as regulars know, my plans do change quite a bit, but perhaps with some pressure I might say more on a few things, such as commenting here on a request to know more about my thoughts on The Long Ships: 

I knew most of the story told there from reading saga fragments and summaries over the years, but Frans Bengtsson reworks them into a moving narrative that feels simultaneously "epic" and realistic, a trick not many authors have managed to pull off in this historical/mythical field.

Now back to reading.  296 books down, but I'd like to reach 300 before Sunday night.

Recent Poll Results

Been slacking on posting the last three polls here, so some of these date back to late March.  Here are the results of three polls (two expiring back on April 2, last one on April 16) on books to be read/reviewed (the middle one is for Shakespeare's comedies):

Faulkner, Go Down Moses	15 (18%)
Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel	9 (11%)
Joyce, Ulysses	38 (47%)
Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone (5 vols.)	19 (23%)
Beukes, Zoo City	6 (7%)
wa Thiong'o, Dreams in a Time of War	18 (22%)
Maupassant, The Tales of Guy de Maupassant	21 (26%)
Hughes, The Poetry of Langston Hughes	2 (2%)
Disch, The Prisoner	10 (12%)
Sholokhov, And Quiet Flows the Don	6 (7%)
Beaulieu, The Winds of Khalakovo	8 (10%)
James, The Ambassadors	13 (16%)
McIntosh, Soft Apocalypse	6 (7%)
Carpentier, Los pasos perdidos/The Lost Steps	7 (8%)
Doctorow, With a Little Help	10 (12%)

The Tempest	21 (47%)
The Two Gentlemen of Verona	3 (6%)
The Merry Wives of Windsor	4 (9%)
Measure for Measure	4 (9%)
The Comedy of Errors	3 (6%)
Much Ado About Nothing	8 (18%)
Love's Labour's Lost	3 (6%)
A Midsummer Night's Dream	14 (31%)
The Merchant of Venice	9 (20%)
As You Like It	5 (11%)
The Taming of the Shrew	10 (22%)
All's Well That Ends Well	1 (2%)
Twelfth Night	8 (18%)
The Winter's Tale	11 (25%)

Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior	44 (48%)
D.F. Wallace, The Pale King	20 (22%)
Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust	14 (15%)
wa Thiong'o, Devil on the Cross	7 (7%)
Anonymous, El poema del Cíd/The Poem of El Cid	8 (8%)
Finney, The Unholy City	4 (4%)
Bolaño, Los sinsabores del verdadero policia	16 (17%)
Petronius, The Satyricon	10 (11%)
Sterne, Tristram Shandy	16 (17%)
Morris, The Wood Beyond the World	8 (8%)
Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar	18 (20%)
Munn, Merlin's Ring	5 (5%)
Machen, The Three Imposters	5 (5%)
Bukowski, Pulp	14 (15%)
Dunsany, Over the Hills and Far Away	19 (21%

Each of these highlighted entries will be seriously considered for a review in the near future (it might take a few months, depending on a lot of factors; I need to rediscover my reviewing mojo) and at the very least will be read (if not already) in the coming weeks.

Results of the 4th reviewing poll and the Shakespearian tragedies poll

Which Shakespearean tragedies would you most want to see reviewed?

Coriolanus	6 (22%)
Titus Andronicus	7 (25%)
Romeo and Juliet	3 (11%)
Timon of Athens	1 (3%)
Julius Caesar	6 (22%)
Macbeth	13 (48%)
Hamlet	9 (33%)
King Lear	10 (37%)
Othello	6 (22%)
Antony and Cleopatra	3 (11%)
Cymbeline	3 (11%)
Pericles	2 (7%)

Which of these might make for the most appealing review?

Omar Khayyam, Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam	17 (16%)
Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife	11 (10%)
Gustave Flaubert, Salammbô	20 (19%)
Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear	34 (32%)
Laila Lalami, Secret Son	7 (6%)
Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Scarab Path	13 (12%)
Honore Balzac, Pere Goriot	15 (14%)
Zoran Živković, The Writer/The Book/The Reader	26 (24%)
Aristotle, Politics	21 (20%)
Roberto Bolaño, 2666	44 (41%)
Jesse Bullington, The Enterprise of Death	18 (17%)
Charles Saunders, Imaro	6 (5%)
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient	6 (5%)
Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Cressida	11 (10%)
Clark Asthon Smith, Hyperborea	16 (15%)

I hope to review the bolded titles sometime in the near future, although some may be pushed back a bit.  Will shortly post a new Shakespeare poll shortly, this one on his comedies.  Feel free to comment here with your favorite Shakespearean comedies.  In a couple of weeks, I'll have a third one on his histories (I should note that these are all Easton Press editions and some may debate the merits of some plays appearing in one book and not another).

Poll Results for the Third 2011 Reviewing Poll

Rousseau, The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau	7 (6%)
Goethe, Faust (both parts)	27 (24%)
Abercrombie, The Heroes	30 (27%)
Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov	35 (31%)
Shakespeare, Poems	11 (10%)
Lawrence, Women in Love	9 (8%)
Aristophanes, The Birds & The Frogs	10 (9%)
Swift, Gulliver's Travels	20 (18%)
Pascal, Pensées	13 (11%)
London, The Sea-Wolf	5 (4%)
Erikson, The Crippled God	42 (38%)
Mann, The Magic Mountain	18 (16%)
Harte, California Stories	1 (0%)
Irwin, The Arabian Nightmare	13 (11%)
Delany, Nova	20 (18%)
Gilman, Herland	5 (4%)

Here are the final results of the third 2011 reviewing poll I've run. I let this one run for two weeks (as I actually hadn't read most of the books on the list at the time of posting it; still have 1/3 left to read, including the top 3 books chosen on this list, as the Erikson won't be arriving until early next week and I plan on finishing the other two later this weekend), and the closeness of several of these speaks volumes of the wide interests of this blog's readership.

I still have 1-2 at least from the previous poll to review in the next couple of days (Rabelais at least, maybe the 6th-8th choices in the coming weeks), but the bolded titles I do hope to get to in the coming weeks.

Shortly, I'll be posting a fourth poll, again to run for two weeks. Feel free to weigh in on your thoughts about the poll results and on these polls in general (I still plan on reviewing certain "losers" at a latter date, as I will be doing my own chosen reviews in the next few weeks).

Poll Results

Cervantes, Don Quixote	23 (26%)
Fast, April Morning	2 (2%)
Whitman, Leaves of Grass	7 (8%)
Yeats, The Poems of W.B. Yeats	14 (16%)
Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men	10 (11%)
Aesop, Fables	9 (10%)
Emerson, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson	2 (2%)
Andersen, Fairy Tales	9 (10%)
Montaigne, Essays	9 (10%)
Kafka, The Trial	22 (25%)
Thackeray, Vanity Fair	9 (10%)
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching	11 (12%)
Dickens, Great Expectations	13 (14%)
St. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine	23 (26%)
Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel	19 (21%)
Russell, Swamplandia!	8 (9%)
Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass	5 (5%)
Mirbeau, Torture Garden	8 (9%)
Masoch, Venus in Furs	10 (11%)
Stendhal, The Red and the Black	13 (14%)
Tolstoy, War and Peace	30 (34%)

Marked in bold are the books I'll review first from this list.  Depending on time/energy, I'll try to have reviews of these done by early March.  In a week or so, around the end of the month, I'll post another set, as it seems doing so encourages me to review more and it might be exposing readers to books which might intrigue them now that they are aware of their existence.  Although I must admit some of the choices might lead to relatively poor reviews, due to the nature of the work being considered, this might also help me develop as a more well-rounded reviewer and critic.

Ready for another round of book/review voting?

Since the past poll was quite successful, I thought I'd bring it back for the books that I've recently finished or shall finish this weekend (minus a couple that I had to leave out either due to writing reviews this weekend or for another project).  Like the first poll, there is a mixture of the old and the new, prose, poetry (but no drama this time, sadly), non-fiction and fiction alike.  There may be something for everyone or everything for some people. 

Like the first time, you can vote for as many as you'd like to see reviewed here.  Just keep in mind that some works I read might be more of a challenge to cover decently than others, not that this ought to dissuade you (or me) from voting (or reviewing) for those works.  Should also note that two more books from the previous poll, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, will be reviewed in the very near future, along with Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Feel free to comment here if you want to persuade undecided readers which books might lead to the best possible reviews (of the mixture of the personal recollection and, if it merits, a more critical stance).

Results of the reviewing poll are in

Conrad, Heart of Darkness	31 (38%)
James, The Portrait of a Lady	7 (8%)
Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales	22 (27%)
Boccaccio, The Decameron	15 (18%)
Beckett, En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot)	8 (9%)
de la Barca, La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream)	2 (2%)
Plato, The Republic	14 (17%)
Mills, Political Writings (omnibus)	1 (1%)
Calvino, Il barone rampante (The Baron in the Trees)	19 (23%)
Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland	19 (23%)
Crane, The Red Badge of Courage	5 (6%)
Morrow, The Diviner's Tale	4 (4%)
McDermott, Never Knew Another	13 (16%)
Conrad, Lord Jim	11 (13%)
Gurney, The Hittites	3 (3%)
Bloom, Flight to Lucifer	2 (2%)
Gardiner, The Egyptians	3 (3%)
Cook, The Persians	7 (8%)
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe	12 (14%)
Conrad and Ford, The Inheritors	2 (2%)
Browning, The Poems of Robert Browning	6 (7%)
Turgenev, Fathers and Sons	14 (17%)
Ramuz, Jean-Luc persécuté	0 (0%)
Grimm, Grimm's Fairy Tales	20 (24%)
Hunt, Across Five Aprils	1 (1%)
Saggs, The Babylonians	6 (7%)
Aira, Los fantasmas (The Ghosts)	10 (12%)
Harman, Towards Speculative Realism	10 (12%)

The top five votegetters are highlighted; each will be reviewed within the next 10 days, in order of finish.  Since this seemed to be fairly popular, might run something similar to this around the end of February for books that I might otherwise not review in a timely fashion.

Anybody else (pleasantly) surprised by the results of this poll?

Literary award poll

For those who read this blog via RSS feeds, just thought I'd write a quick little post to point out that I've added a new poll about recent and upcoming literary fiction awards.  One should not live by bread alone, nor would I ever dream of just reading SF/F genre fiction.  Long before I began reading speculative fiction in earnest, I was reading some excellent lit fic and I think it might be interesting if I start covering (if belatedly in some cases) lit fic award finalists as much as I cover spec fic awards.  There will be some reviews in coming weeks of said works, including Nicole Krauss' Great House, a National Book Award fiction finalist that arrived earlier today.

Are you interested at all on my thoughts on any of these award shortlists?  If so, vote in the poll to the right.  If not, I guess you could choose the final option, even though it will not dissuade me in any way from covering realist fiction that intrigues me.

Poll on SF/F Masterworks reading/reviewing

For those who read this blog via RSS Feeds and might not see all the features of this blog without direct clicking, I have posted a feedback poll on the Gollancz Fantasy and SF Masterworks reviews that I have posted these past couple of months, both here and on the SFF Masterworks blog.  Please take the time to choose one of the five options I've listed (I think I covered most of the likely range of answers, but if I failed to include an option that best suits you, feel free to respond here).

Shortly, I plan on posting reviews of Geoff Ryman's The Child Garden and Arkday and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic here, with Fritz Leiber's The First Book of Lankhmar to be posted on the SFF Masterworks blog in a day or two, with vol. 2 soon to follow.  I do hope to have at least 30 reviews of the Fantasy Masterworks and 40 of the SF Masterworks complete by Christmas (it's about 21-23 each right now, I think) and all the current releases by mid-2011.  Oh, and I just learned a couple of days ago that there's also a Crime Masterworks series that reached nearly 50 books and if I continue to feel ambitious/insane, I might tackle those sometime in the next year or two, as my reading of crime/mystery classics is woeful and I do plan on addressing that in the near future.

Changed my mind

Although I'll let the poll run its course, I think I'll go ahead and read/review both the Herbert and Jordan series in the coming days, as I'm finding it hard to read other work now, as I'm finding myself curious to see what my reactions will be to the two series.  Probably will alternate back and forth between the two, starting in the near future.

Hopefully, this way I can piss off and/or intrigue as many different people as possible.  And who knows, maybe absence will have made the heart grow fonder, or maybe I'll be reminded of what I don't want to read in a series.  Only time and experience (again) will tell, I suppose.

So yeah, there might be several more multi-volume works reviewed in this space in the coming months, along with newer and non-genre works.

Thinking of doing a re-reading/review series after I finish my latest batch of reviews

Sometime in the next week to 10 days, I'm going to finish the remaining 8 books in my reading/reviewing queue (as well as writing reviews for a further six that have already been read).  I will have finished my crash studying for the mathematics portion of the GRE then as well and unless I get hired immediately for a position I'm applying tomorrow, I should still have at least a month's worth of "free time" to do another reading project.

This time, rather than devoting 2-3 weeks to writing an average of a review a day of books I had never before read, I am thinking about reviewing a series of books in a fashion similar to the reviews I wrote of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun in 2007 and of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Peake's Gormenghast novels that I reviewed in the spring of 2009. Two series that I haven't read in ages (or at least the majority of the books) are Frank Herbert's six novels set in the Dune universe (I will not consider re-reading/reviewing any of the son's collaborative works) and Robert Jordan's ongoing The Wheel of Time novels (the first eleven novel; I've already reviewed the twelfth). 

Here are my experiences with each:  read all six of Herbert's books in 2001 but with the exception of reading the Spanish translation in 2004 and the first part of the Serbian translation (each for the first book) and a parallel reading of that translation with the English original in 2008, I have not read any of the other books since then.

For the WoT series:  I haven't read the first nine books since 2000, I read the 10th volume 3 years after its release (2006 read) and books 11 and 12 were read in late October 2009.

I imagine there would be a mixture of familiarity (which can breed contempt, ya know) and quasi-"newness" to these texts.  Curious also to see how my tastes have a reader have changed in the intervening 9-10 years.  But I probably will read only one of these in the next few months and since I feel charitable just this once, I'll let people vote on it, since I do still feel a bit of ambiguity toward both series and really am not all that invested in either one.  Oh, and since there doubtless will be negative comments as well as positive, if you're voting on the one you love the most, keep in mind that there might be a few more evisceration moments than is the norm here.  Then again, if you want to vote for the book that you think I'd rip apart the most, feel free to indulge in Schadenfreude.

Re-read will start a day or two after the poll closes late on the 18th and it may be only one book a week, or perhaps 2-3.  I will not read/review one a day, even if I am more than capable of doing so.  Let the voting begin (if it hasn't already begun as of the posting of this article)!

Perhaps the oddest pairing yet in a weekly poll of mine

Was just now thinking of two vastly different books, one that I've not yet read, and the other that I endured when doing my undergraduate and graduate research.  So I thought I'd put a poll up to see which would make for the more interesting review possibility, St. Thomas Aquinas' most famous work, or the autobiography/manifesto of Adolf Hitler.

I feel as though I am parodying a Frank Stockton tale in thinking, "What will it be, the Saint or der Führer?"

International SF Poll

After several false starts (and health/work scares thrown in), I'm going to be working on a lengthy article this weekend on international SF.  In the meantime, thought it might be interesting to post a poll seeing which countries people here might view as having a vibrant SF/F scene(s).  I know I left off several countries, but I hope I managed to get most of the ones of interest out there.  If I failed to do so, feel free to leave a comment here in this post, for my (and others') edification.

Now back to grumbling about waking up two hours early...

New poll on predicting the World Fantasy Award winner for Best Novel

I guess if I want to get more reader participation (well, outside of those where a few delete their cookies and vote multiple times in order to sway a choice), I'll have to run more polls in the future featuring rabid squirrels, since that poll was among the most-participated of any that I've run over the past year or so.

Still extremely busy with lots of things in my personal and professional life (much more so than I thought I'd be at this point, but the former seems to be resolving itself somewhat at least and the latter is apparently always going to be in flux), so not as many updates and reviews as I would have wished.  But since this week will see the World Fantasy Convention begin in San Jose, California, I thought at the very least I could run a speculative poll as to which novel will win the Best Novel award (the other categories are stacked, but I suspect those don't hold as much interest for many readers here).

So, for those of you who only read this blog via RSS feeds, you might want to visit here directly and make your voice heard...or something.

New poll on a possible (un)official mascot for this blog

Forget the weighty issue of choosing between excellent books.  I have decided to present to you a new image (in the upper right corner of the blog) and a new poll seeking opinions on a possible (un)official mascot for this blog.

There's just something about squirrels that has appealed to me for years, even before they became a sort of in-joke between me and another on another site.  Nothing says a combination of quickness, intelligence, craziness, and perhaps evil like a squirrel grasping the mother source of paper, a tree.  Therefore, I think it might be amusing to have the squirrel become a sort of mascot for this blog.  What do you think?

For those viewing this via RSS feeds, be sure to visit the blog directly so you can vote in this very non-serious poll!

I love people who take my silly polls so seriously

Fun to watch the person who has refreshed/deleted cookies 19 times apparently (according to the Sitemeter log that I just checked on a whim) to vote for George R.R. Martin's Fevre Dream enough times to make it the apparent winner with just over two hours to go in voting.

Guess what?  I don't always follow the results of the polls now (actually, I still have two I want to review first).  I think I'll go with the second-place vote getter first, then the Martin (since it was a somewhat more legitimate second-place entry).

Ah, the power to ignore the will of the masses (or those who want to vote multiple times in a 13 minute span)!

I so need an evil dictator picture to close this, but instead this pic might be even more evil:

Feeling the evilness yet?