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594 are eligible to vote, but I'm guessing only a small proportion of them will.

110 eligible voters visited the election page so far.

Going back to the prodigy topic: Mary Shelley published Frankenstein when she was just 20 years old.

Wow! Didn't know that.

Christopher Paolini finished Eragon when he was still in his teens.

@Tsundoku That I did know

Alexander Pope was 21 when his Pastorals were published.

Meanwhile as I struggle to read A Tale of Two Cities last semester

I know several people who could write fiction at age fourteen that outclassed a lot of published works.

@Tsundoku I wouldn't count that as a great work of literature though ;-) More a patchwork of plagiarised themes and tropes held together by a thin paste of simply being enjoyable and having good characters.

I admit I have never read anything by Paolini.

On a different note... thanks for the reminder, @heather. Now I just have to hope it doesn't fall apart in my hands, having been printed in 1982 and not in the best condition...

Oh, Night is such a good book

The back cover, uh, isn't attached.

Yikes!

I hadn't read any fantasy before I joined this site and I can't remember reading any fantasy besides Ursula Le Guin.

I guess that's a good place to start.

Harry Potter is a classic XD

I've never actually read Eragon before. Couldn't get past like the second or third page

That's the nice thing about reading challenges: they motivate you to read works that were not necessarily on your to-read list.

Tolkien of course has got to be the main founding father of fantasy, but Le Guin was also original, pioneering many ideas and tropes, and very influential in fantasy literature.

@NorthLæraðr rolleyes

I somewhere have copies of LoTR, The Silmarillon and a few other ones but never started reading them ...

Ahahaha

@Tsundoku I love Tolkien, but his works are too dense for my small brain

@NorthLæraðr Sometimes the best books can be the hardest to get into. (Not saying necessarily in this case, but it's something I've found in general.)

@Randal'Thor My experience with The Hobbit

Wheel of Time has a super slow start. Literally nothing of interest happens for the first five chapters.

Oh, wait, I once started with The Silmarillon but put it away after a while. That was a bad starting point.

Then suddenly sword-wielding trolls break into the protagonist's kitchen in the fifth chapter.

@Randal'Thor Ooh

My favorite book series is actually a fantasy novel

(I'm making it sound really kitsch, aren't I.)

After I had read The Name of the Rose, some people thought it had a slow start. I thought, "Uh?"

@Tsundoku The Silmarillion is hard enough even if you have read Lord of the Rings first. If you haven't, I can't even imagine.

The Eye of the World was about twice as much of a slog as LotR. ;)

The Young Elites by Marie Lu is a great book series. Well, at least I think so

@Mithical Even after the first five chapters?

I mean, it's already been a couple years since I read it and I only read it once, but... yeah.

But starting in 2020, I wanted to move through literature in chronological order, starting with the Epic of Gilgamesh. But judging by the time I've spent on Gilgamesh alone, I will need to live for aeons just to get to twentieth-century literature.

Ooh if anyone is looking for a good mystery novel

I have a book

But its title is still a mystery ...

Lol

No it's called The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

@NorthLæraðr The Tale of Miss Tery and Mr E?

@NorthLæraðr Is that seven and a half or seventy-one over two? ;-)

@Randal'Thor I was gonna say "Who Framed Mr. Roger Rabbit"

@NorthLæraðr There's even a Wikipedia article about it.

@Randal'Thor 7 and a Half

@Tsundoku It's so good, they have the cover twice

@NorthLæraðr I read a book which had Chapter 19 twice.

@Randal'Thor Huh

And no, it wasn't a printing error ;-)

I once read a book with no chapter numbers- wait

Ah, I was going to ask whether it was a postmodern novel.

I once read a book so well written, it didn't have anything in it.

Strangely, it was titled "Notebook"

:-D

It's like the pages at the end of an atlas.

@Mithical Or like any textbook

@Mithical Sometimes, the pages at the end are the atlas.

(Lord of the Rings)

Are those also empty

If you want to read a novel that constantly addresses you as a reader (you know, for a change), you can try If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino.

One time, we had an English assignment where we had to do some poetry/visual art thingy on a book page, and I swear a part of me died when I heard the paper being ripped from the book

She has like just a stack of Lord of the Flies for this very project

@NorthLæraðr "Oh captain, my captain!"

> The postmodernist narrative, in the form of a frame story, is about the reader trying to read a book called If on a winter's night a traveler.

How Borgesian.

@Tsundoku Carpe diem?

> The young pilot was still grinning broadly. "That's why they always put two blank pages at the back of the atlas. They're for new countries. You're meant to fill them in yourself." (The BFG, chapter 21: "The Plan", by Roald Dahl)

@NorthLæraðr Yep, Understanding Poetry.

Love that movie

Tolkien is awesome

quite honestly Lord of the Rings is my favorite book.

and it's not just his middle earth stuff - his retelling of the story of sigurd and gudrun, for example, is fantastic.

He's got so much imagination

And all that worldbuilding! It's so detailed

@heather Now that's how to enter a conversation ;-)

@Randal'Thor haha

also Roverandom is just cute.

i have a slight Tolkien obsession.

There are worse things to be obsessed with.

Agreed on Roverandom.

Characters like P!samathos and Artaxerxes still stick in the mind to this day.

@NorthLæraðr Apparently, the book they tore the pages out of was real, but they changed the author's name in the film.

@Tsundoku That's... interesting

See Laurence Perrine.

Okay I'm going to go

For now

I have to practice music

For those of y'all curious, I play the trumpet

And I have to practice sleeping ;-)

@NorthLæraðr Have fun.

@NorthLæraðr Surely it's a treempet in your case?

@Tsundoku *looks at clock* ...whoops.

i have given up on a normal sleep schedule at this point.

I pretend to be an athlete so I try to sleep normally... but I keep failing

@Mithical Done :)

I've been doing better in the last week or so at sleeping early.

So, goodnight :-)

@Gallifreyan thank ye

@Randal'Thor \o

Does it say anywhere on the election page itself how many moderator spots are up for election?

Yes, on the side. 2.

Aha. Not in the main body.