The Reading Room

9:33 AM

@b_jonas We just pick the suggestion with the highest number of votes; if there is a tie, we pick the oldest among those.

@b_jonas I have been holding back on posting new suggestions for quite some time. I have a list of at least two dozen suggestions that I have not posted yet.

2 hours later…

11:48 AM

@Tsundoku sure, but even if you post them, I'm not sure if it will be enough. we'll just have a lot of solutions, each with very few votes.

but maybe I'm just wrong

Well, I don't quite know how to encourage people to vote more on suggestion and to participate more in the challenges.

@Tsundoku I think eventually you just have to accept that we can't do this every month

so we just make a rule that if there's no topic with at least 3 votes, we wait

or 4 votes, or 2 votes, how many exactly is my original question

We might do that, but that requires discussion on Meta SE, I think.

12:04 PM

We may also have to decide whether we can accept proposals that are repeats from Sci Fi

(or from Mythology or Arcade or Movies etc)

I don't see how SFF is relevant, since that site does not read books in a literary way.

12:26 PM

People Are Sharing The Books They Think Should Be Stripped Of Their "Classic" Status Immediately (BuzzFeed, June 2021). I didn't know Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls was a classic; I've never heard of it. And some readers don't want to read Lord of the Rings for school (do teachers assign that?).

There should be a list of books that people actually liked reading and discussing in class. (I.e. not just reading at home.)

Is "classic" a status that can be stripped?

Well, the sentiment could be translated as "should no longer be assigned at school".

One of the comments below the article says, "The main takeaway from this article is that a lot of these people are not as smart as they think they are."

Unlike phone books ;-)

Reading a phone book could be an assignment for a maths class. "Find the most interesting pattern among these numbers."

50 Books Taught In School That Are Actually Great, I Promise, also from BuzzFeed. This list is longer and has some overlap with the previous one. No phone books, though.

12:49 PM

40 Books You Hated in High School That You'll Love Now. Again, a lot of overlap.

Mithical

1:17 PM

@Tsundoku It's an old book where a beloved animal dies at the end. That automatically assigns it classic status, no?

;)

1 hour later…

2:24 PM

The five best trees in literature, a reading list for @Prince North Læraðr ;-)

1 hour later…

Bookworm

3:31 PM

Q: Ogden Nash poem on hiccups

I have a vivid memory of reading a poem by Ogden Nash about hiccups that included the word "epiglottis" to help explain why they happen. It tickled me as a kid, but now I can't seem to find it. The book also included "The Tale Of Custard The Dragon", "The Jellyfish", "Adventures of Isabel", "Wombat"

2 hours later…

bobble

5:28 PM

NAA?

5:48 PM

> Oh, wet
> pet.
> (Ode to a Goldfish, by Ogden Nash)

@bobble I agree. (Unfortunately, it's from an unregistered user, who is less likely to come back and improve it.)

@Tsundoku The same topic (e.g. fantasy book series) could still be done both here and there, though.

All of the topics so far in SFF's fledgeling topic challenge projects have been books or authors rather than screen stuff, so it'd all be on-topic here too.

6:27 PM

@Randal'Thor Yes, that is implicitly the point of my message. It was an argument against removing suggestions from our list because they had been covered elsewhere.

6:43 PM

Ah, that point was too implicit to be clear to me.

We could potentially think about running a joint topic challenge with SFF: having the same topic on both sites, people can ask some types of questions here and others there. Last month saw a joint SFF-Arqade topic challenge. That would be harder to do here, though, because Arqade didn't have an existing topic challenge structure, and SFF and Lit don't have such a clear line between what's on-topic for one site vs the other.

Currently, there aren't any suggestions that both lists have in common, although I can imagine Samuel R. Delaney and Nnedi Okorafor as suggestions here, and possibly Stanislaw Lem as a suggestion of SFF SE.

Or we could indeed do what b_jonas suggested: taking a break from topic challenges as long as there is no suggestion with, e.g. at least 4 votes. If anybody here has "topic challenge fatigue" (I should look that up in DSM), this might help.

But I wouldn't post a meta question about it until after the question on pinning accepted answers has been settled.

7:05 PM

@Randal'Thor scifi.stackexchange.com/q/244400/4918 is about the movie, but sure

@Tsundoku they're not suggested yet, yes. I personally don't think Stanisław Lem or Isaac Asimov are useful topic challenges, on Sci fi or here, because the point of topic challenges is to point to stuff that most users would otherwise not read, ones that we don't already have lots of questions about.

but someone might cross-suggest challenges from Sci Fi in the future (even I might try), so it's best if you think about how you'd react in advance.

I hadn't noticed that SFF SE already had 19 question tagged stanislaw-lem. Nnedi Okorafor only has two question, so might still work.

It's a bit difficult to react in advance to a suggestion I have not seen yet :-)

@Tsundoku yeah, it's more or less necessary. Stanisław Lem's Sci Fi stories are famous and thought-provoking, Lit is new, so we posted questions on Sci Fi.