Around the Year in 52 Books discussion

And the results are in!

POLL 15

Top:
A book with fewer than 5000 ratings on Goodreads
A book with a main character whose name starts with A, T, or Y
A book with an academic setting or with a teacher that plays an important role

Bottom:
In honor of the classic second season episode, "Twenty Two," a book related to The Twilight Zone
A book connected to liminality/transitions

Polarizing:
A book relevant to the theme or lyrics of a specific Beatle's Song

FALL READ-A-THON WINNER
Roxana was the lucky winner of our Fall Read-a-Thon giveaway, and she chose:

A book related to a game

(See message two for some suggestions and ideas about this prompt!)

The next suggestions thread will open around 10 am CST on Wednesday, September 29. Only 4 prompts to go!

Listopias:
A book with fewer than 5000 ratings on Goodreads
A book with a main character whose name starts with A, T, or Y
A book with an academic setting or with a teacher that plays an important role
A book related to a game

IDEAS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR THE READ-A-THON PROMPT

- mystery or thriller with a game (a lot of YA thrillers use truth or dare). probably lots of romance books use similar premises with, uh, happier endings ;) ;)
- things like The Westing Game or The Inheritance Games or Mr Lemoncello's Library or Ready Player One where an eccentric rich guy sets up some weirdly convoluted scavenger hunt (an oddly loveable book premise)
- sports books
- relevant listopias:
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/7...
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/9...
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/3...
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...

Does this batch leave us with just 7 more to vote for?

Amy, there's just 4 left to vote for! There were 7 after Poll 14, but these three made it just four left. (I need to update some threads, including the introduction thread, to add prompts from this week and last.)

"Related to a game" sounds FUN, especially since I have the perfect book on my TBR. Diana Peterfreund has written a YA mystery series based on the game CLUE (aka Cludo).

book #1: In the Hall with the Knife
book #2: In the Study with the Wrench
book #3: In the Ballroom with the Candlestick (pending)

I love A book related to a game! I don’t care for any of the top prompts.

Really nice our lucky winner picked a theme with some scope. It’s sad that the Twilight prompt got bottomed

Related to a Game :)
I just bought The World Played Chess

Currently reading A Passage to India - two of the main characters' names start with A - Adela and Aziz

I only voted for one of the 3. Sad that Twilight Zone is a bottom!

I do love related to a game though, it's one I've considered floating in the past. I may do The Queen's Gambit, but will also but using the Listopia for ideas.

Emily wrote: "Amy, there's just 4 left to vote for! There were 7 after Poll 14, but these three made it just four left. (I need to update some threads, including the introduction thread, to add prompts from this..."

Oh good, that makes more sense. I thought we were closer than that but the math wasn't adding up!

Emily wrote: "Amy, there's just 4 left to vote for! There were 7 after Poll 14, but these three made it just four left. (I need to update some threads, including the introduction thread, to add prompts from this..."

With the Fall Read-A-Thon winner's choice, isn't only 3 left?

No, last poll I said there were 7 left to be voted in, knowing that one more would come from the Read-a-Thon (so there were 8 spots total). So now there's only 4 left to be voted in.

I am pleasantly surprised by the winners. I voted for two of them.

The academic/school prompt is doable but I get it every single year in some kind of challenge, and I'm over it. I already have the game prompt this year, too, so I'll just take one of the books I had on my shortlist and do that.

So glad to see these results! I think that's the first time this year I voted for all the winners.

Related to a game is an interesting pick. I don't have anything that immediately comes to mind but it could have a wide scope depending on how you interpret it. I will have to do some TBR scavenging on that one :)

Very happy with this group of prompts! The only one I didn't vote for or against was the less than 5,000 ratings only because I read a lot of ARCs and some more obscure ones so it seemed fairly easy for me to fill, but I love the concept and push to read some hidden gems! And the game prompt seems very interesting!

For ATY I'm going to see if I can BIO and find Y name main characters.

Sam wrote: "Very happy with this group of prompts! The only one I didn't vote for or against was the less than 5,000 ratings only because I read a lot of ARCs and some more obscure ones so it seemed fairly eas..."

There was a similar prompt in the Popsugar reading challenge one year (I think it was), and I decided for myself, that the book had to be at least a year old (I also read a lot of ARC's, in Danish and children's books, so not very rated on GR at all).

Lots of directions to go with the game prompt, like I'm currently playing Timberborn, a beaver city building game where they have to survive droughts. So I know I have a wishlist book about beavers, or I could squish in a cli-fi book. I've also been playing Graveyard Keeper, so grave robbers, alchemy or zombies would work. Or I could go down the straightforward route of there being a game in the book.

I will probably use the academia/teacher prompt for a dark academia book.

I didn’t vote for any of the winners but they are all easy enough to fill. I already have a selection from my owned books for each of them. I like the games prompt! Maybe I will finish The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse. The Queens’s Gambit is another option. Too bad the Beatles prompt didn’t get in but that’s ok. I’m planning to do a side challenge with it anyways.

Johanne wrote: "Sam wrote: "Very happy with this group of prompts! The only one I didn't vote for or against was the less than 5,000 ratings only because I read a lot of ARCs and some more obscure ones so it seeme..."

Oh that's a good call and way to make things more challenging, thanks Johanne!

I have several of Amazon's First Reads books that I haven't read, and many of those have less than 5,000 ratings so I'll probably do one of those, instead of a review book (which does seem a bit like cheating to use an unpublished book).

I realized there's a new Beartown coming out, so that works for a game, and the Ninth House sequel is also supposed to be coming, so I can use that for the academic one.

No problem using an unpublished book, it qualifies.

Oh yeah, I know it does. But to me it would be cheating in this case, because of course it would have less than 5,000 ratings. I guess it would be possible for a super popular book, but not likely.

I looked at the last 20 books I read and 2 qualify because they just came out so there aren't yet 5000 ratings, though there probably will be by the time we are doing the challenge in 2022, and 7 or 8 others qualify because they just aren't that commonly read. I read some scholarly books for my part-time gig where I talk about women from history and I also have weird older books that got onto my shelves somehow.

I am happy about the <5000 ratings, because I have so many books on my TBR that qualify! I just went through my short list of books I REALLY want to read next year, and selected any book that was published before 2020 and has fewer than 4000 ratings today, and added them to the list.

I can't say I'm thrilled with the character name, because that just seems like a silly reason to choose a book. I went through the book synopses from my same short list and noted any book with any named character that had an A, T, or Y name as first, middle, or last. I included books in which the character was a missing person or someone from the past - if they were important enough to be named in the synopsis, I decided they counted as a "main character." I got a pretty decent group of books so I guess I'm okay with this category!

I don't read a lot of popular fiction so the fewer than 5000 rating is kind of a gimme prompt for me. At least one third of my Owned and Unread books will work.

I feel like the academia prompt is very overdone but then I do a lot of different challenges so I probably see it more than most people.

I'm thrilled that the ATY prompt made the list.

I have one book that works perfectly for the game prompt. Even though it's super limiting to only have one option it's a book I want to read so it works just fine.

Can't believe we've nearly completed the list!

I really like the read-a-thon winner. I've been hoping we'd get some more theme prompts and related to a game sounds like it could be a lot of fun.

I'm disappointed bees and within a year didn't make it, but I don't mind any of the prompts that did win. I'm not very excited about any of them either, but they'll all be fairly easy for me to fill from my TBR.

I'm sad about the Beatles and the bees. Oh well....

This is the first year I've followed along with the ATY prompt selection process for the following year. I am so glad I have done so this year!

I already have such long lists of possibilities to fulfill each prompt and now as other challenges reveal their prompts later this year, I can search for books that fulfill prompts across other challenges as well!

And it is really interesting to me to see the prompts selected and those that are rejected. Thanks to the moderators for handling all this! It's a lot of work!

I'm pleasantly surprised by the results this week! Two of the three were in my top votes, and the under 5000 ratings is decent too. I have literally thousands of books on my TBR so I'm sure I will have no problem finding something, although I'm definitely limiting myself to books that have already come out.

I also think the book related to a game is interesting. I read one or two books this year that involved Two Truths and a Lie, and those were really fun. I'll have to look at what else I have.

Happy with this weeks results and love the game prompt! looking forward to seeing what makes it on the Listopia.

Very sad that the Beatles prompt didn’t make it, but I can do it as a side challenge.

I like the game prompt and I have several I can use for it.
Ready Player Two
Ender's Game
The Lying Game

I'm excited for this prompt.

I also like the less than 5,000 rating one. I have found some of my best books that aren't widely known. The character one with A, T, or Y I think will be easy. The school setting I'm excited about because I found The Testing on clearance this year. So I'm happy with all of the prompts.

Nina wrote: "Very sad that the Beatles prompt didn’t make it, but I can do it as a side challenge."

Karen wrote: "I'm sad about the Beatles and the bees. Oh well...."

Me too. I plan to do a side challenge for Beatles songs. I really like what I've been finding so far.

I was going to try to use a the Tarot cards for a side set, but I'm finding many of the categories are too similar to one another, and nothing stands out as personally compelling. So I'll probably just read the Ruth Hogan book about a Tarot Card reader Madame Burova and move on.

Games looks like it will be pretty easy. We could double up on the Monopoly pieces if we wanted to. I never read the classic Chess Story, so that's a possibility. I also have a copy of A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II.

I don't really like the mechanical prompts, but A. T. Y. is easy enough. On the flip side, books with less than 5000 ratings is turning out to be the broadest and most difficult prompt of all for me. I have more than 1000 books on my tbr with less than 5000 votes. I spent a lot of time looking at them already and I still have hundreds of potential books. I'll probably end up using it for a book related to one of the many rejected prompts I liked.

One of my favourite genres is Dark Academia so I am ecstatic that it made it in :)