On the Bechdel Test

Although not specifically related to science-fiction, I thought it likely that any of you who don’t read The Hathor Legacy regularly (because I didn’t, even though it’s on our blogroll) would find Betacandy’s posts on Why film schools teach screenwriters not to pass the Bechdel test and Why discriminate if it doesn’t profit? as interesting as I did. (The posts are from early July, and link back to a post in late June about Female characters exist to promote male leads for network profits.
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Shanghaied to the Moon, a brief review

Somewhere recently I saw a description of Shangaied to the Moon by Michael J. Daley. It sounded so great that on impulse I bought it off the net and read it within the week. It’s a young adult SF book about a kid who wants to be a spaceship pilot, and it’s got the flavor of hard SF in that the kid waxes eloquent about the history of rockets and Apollos and Famousfakescientist-eponymous ramjets, interplanetary voyages, and the evolution of starship drives. The book struck me as a good combination of that sort of starship-crunchy story with a family centered story about identity and memory.

Here are some of the good bits, without spoilers

- a kid obsessed with a reality tv space adventure soap opera and its pilot hero
- the pilot hero not being quite what he seemed
- creepy computer brainwash “therapists”
- total information awareness, surveillance cameras everywhere
- hackers and counter hacking
- recovering memories. Kids and trauma.
- search terms monitored in realtime, getting around it, very Little Brother-ish
- a dead mom (booooo! as always!!!)
- a dead mom not being quite what one would think (Yay!!! as almost never!)

It was a tiny bit too intense psychologically for my 8 year old kid, but I would recommend it for 10 and up, or younger kid who can handle some questioning of sanity and scenes of trauma.

I really liked what was done with the character of the kid’s mom. It felt like a perfect analysis, YA style, of how women’s history gets rewritten or erased and can be uncovered and re-re-written.

It was particularly great when the kid is reading his mom’s journal (in one of the myriad copies of the journal!) and thinks about her as a person separate from her role to him with hopes and dreams and goals for herself.

The story was intense but quick & fun, had lots of scenes in space, dealing with weightlessness, and will make anyone of my geekiness and generation flash back to playing Lunar Lander.

Cornflower’s accidental heroism

“Redwall” by Brian Jacques is nearly perfect for little kids except for the sexy yet demure always-cooking-and-serving mouse maiden Cornflower, the hero Mathias’ love interest. All through Redwall I noticed the reasonably decent gender balance, with good and evil, clever and brave female characters. Sela the Fox was clever and evil; Constance the Badger and Jess the Squirrel were smart, brave warriors. Warbeak the Sparrow Barbarian is super fierce and cool and so is her mother. Guosim the Shrew is a socialist revolutionary leader. So why do we need the demure maiden to blush, look coy, and serve up constant steaming mugs of acorn tea? Also for the other characters, good and evil, to sexually harass her every other minute?

Cornflower does get off a few good speeches about how heroic and special Matthias is. I don’t think she ever has a bit of dialogue (or thought) that isn’t about Matthias the Warrior!

In her one heroic moment, Cornflower the sexy mouse is serving food to the sentries on the Redwall Abbey walls. She sees an attacker sneaking up some scaffolding or siege machinery, screams, and throws her lantern, which bursts and lights the siege tower on fire. That’s all very well but the odd thing, the part that struck me, was how the author carefully and deliberately framed her actions as involuntary. In other words, our hero’s maiden love has to have a brave impulse so that she’s worthy of him in some way other than being a hottie and a good cook, but also has to have her agency denied, I guess either because it would make her slightly comic and unfeminine or because it would undermine the main hero to have a romantic attachment to another hero. Here’s the bits that raised the red flag of Denial of Agency:

Scarely aware of what she was doing, Cornflower threw the lantern… [inferno of fire drives away evil rat warriors] The incident put an end to that night’s fighting. On top of the wall cheering broke out. Cornflower was the heroine of the hour. She blushed as Foremole nodded admiringly.

Then Foremole tells her she’s pretty, calls her missy, and asks for some of her delicious vegetable soup. The Abbot of Redwall explains that using fire in battle was totally forbidden — even the evil rats wouldn’t do it. But “Accident or not, we owe Cornflower a debt of gratitude. She is a very brave young fieldmouse.”

In the Abbey kitchens Cornflower stirred the oatmeal and checked on the bread baking in the oven. She smiled to herself. What would Matthias have thought of it all?

Last night’s heroine. This morning’s cook!

Then (SPOILER but nothing that isn’t obviously coming…) in the final scene the Abbot in his dying breath gives Cornflower to Matthias since “a warrior needs a good wife”. Barf me out! He doesn’t even ask her! He summons her up and gives her away like the useful, desirable, valuable, mindless property that she is.

Oh also? For a book with so many female characters it’s hilarious how it doesn’t pass the Bechdel test! Even when there’s two female characters together, like Warbeak and her mom Dunwing, they only talk about men! Or in this case, “bull sparrows”.

It’s been a lovely relaxing Sunday and a nice read after the intensity of Naomi Novik’s latest Temeraire book, which was Incredibly Fabulous and what I should be writing about instead of a cheap and easy eye-rolling at this YA fantasy book from the 80s, but on the other hand it always seems good to me to point out the obvious that people may have not noticed on their childhood readings of a book still being read — as with the rape/domestic violence issues in Dragonflight and its sequels.

New Who, Season Finale 4, OUCH.

I’m now watching the last episode of New Who’s 4th season finale for the fourth time - the BBC decided to do a repeat today - and for the sake of those who have not been watching it as obsessively, I’m cutting the rest of this.

Well, except to say: I’m not happy.

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I Want My Wife To Like Science-Fiction (Just The Way I Do)

Not a reader of Megan McArdle, but Explaining science fiction to women was linked via a blogpost on the gendering of literature. A fanboy asks the question (because Megan is “every tech boy’s dream come true” as she likes “Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Who, and several other Sci-Fi shows”): “Can you, perchance, teach my wife the allure of such things? I have to watch BSG when she’s not home. Let us not even speak of attempting to watch the Good Doctor.”

It’s not just the presumption that “SF is for boys” and that girls can be “eased into it” only by being promised that it’s “a fairy tale–only a fairy tale with science instead of magic”. (Yeah, because us girls can’t be doing with that boys-only science stuff.) Or presenting Doctor Who as something that has to be “worked up to”. And “Do not, under any circumstances, unveil Sliders until you’re sure she can handle it. Same with movies: Gattica before Blade Runner. Graphic novels: Sandman, not V for Vendetta.”

Some of the comments in the discussion thread that follows are relatively sensible, but mostly… oh god. If this fanboy’s wife liked reading science-fiction, and couldn’t stand trashy TV sci-fi, I don’t suppose he’d be any happier.

Slave rebellion, sex, and space battles

In Susan Wright’s Slave Trade humans are enslaved by the aliens of the Domain, a federation of various species with a strict class system. Humans are kept specifically as sex slaves, but the book isn’t the soft core porn I expected - instead it’s a tale of revolution and resistance, and of class warfare, with exciting space battles and secret plots, intense friendships, relationships, and betrayals. It totally rocked!

There were many ways that Slave Trade didn’t grate on my nerves. I noticed that not many characters are white, but when they are, there’s a physical description of them; in other words there isn’t a racial default for humans (Solians) or aliens. There also aren’t entire alien races who are only good at one thing or who have a single characteristic. Solians and aliens alike, there is nothing remarkable about being bi, lesbian/gay, straight, poly, monogamous, or kinky. There are sympathetic working class characters. The book more than passes the Bechdel test; there are tons of female characters who talk with each other about whatever’s going on; there isn’t an annoying focus on women only as they are important to the experience of the men. There were many minor but pleasing details, like how the Solians born to slavery had never realized their bodies do best on a 24-hour cycle with 8 hours of sleep; the details of the alien slave ship journey so similar to the history of the Africa/New World slave ships; the way that Solians born in slavery are given sort of cute, diminutive pet names or baby-nicknames, like Dot, Dab, Jot, Nip, Mote, and Ash.

Okay, I want to talk about the book but I’m going to try hard for NO spoilers!

The frequent point of view switching is handled well and the characters are distinctive in the way they think and see the world. The story opens from the point of view of Rose Rico, a spoiled, privileged, hard-partying Spanish-speaking club kid from Tijuana. I enjoyed the way that her privileged background and her approach to the world actually came in useful in the action scenes. Other major characters are Ash, an 11th-generation Solian slave who is skilled at survival under extremely oppressive conditions. S/he is a herme, somewhat rare in the Domain but not super rare. Hir reactions to slavery and freedom are very intense. While Rose is the action hero, Ash is the person who goes through the most interesting personal transformations. (And, I thought s/he was the most interesting character because of hir processing of being an abuse survivor.)

S’jen, a Qin from a species enslaved by the Domain for working in dangerous mines, is Captain of the Fury, a Qin rebellion fighting ship. She’s a total fanatic in her resistance and her quest for revenge. Gandre Li, a Beta (in the Dominion class system where Alphas rank most highly) merchant ship captain, has a loving relationship with her Solian slave Trace, and tries hard to protect Trace from rape and abuse by higher class Alphas. Kwort Delta, a male character from the rural colony of Deneb, is a working class engineer who gets pushed around horribly by bullies on his Dominion battleship work squad. G’kaan is the one character who I thought showed an echo of Wright’s background writing Star Trek novels as he agonizes over his half Qin, half Solian ancestry. Last but not least we see a bit of the story through the eyes of its main villain, Rikev Alpha, commander of Spacepost T-3, a sadistic jerk obsessed with power games and increasing the status of his family line; we do see his position under his equally jerky Alpha commander and his intelligence, resolve, and competence.

So, I’m sure you’re all wondering about the alien sex. The gimmick here is that all the races in the known universe have periods of going into heat. Alphas (who may actually be a separate alien race) go into heat every 6 days and it is hard for them to synchronize with others, which is supposedly why they “need” to have Solian sex slaves who are always “sexually receptive”. Other characters vary in their cycles. For example Kwort the Denebian goes into heat daily — but only for 5 minutes. This is how the situation is set up, but it becomes really clear that a ton of the aliens just fool around whenever they feel like it whether they’re in heat or not (which seems to mean, able to have an orgasm) and that “sexually receptive” is a euphemism for low status enough to be easily rapeable. None of the sex is explicit, or even described. There is no vaguely embarrassing soft-core throbbing alienhood.

I can’t wait to read the sequel. I read this book as a result of hearing Naamen and I think ladyjax talk about it at WisCon over drinks along with Derrick Bell’s “The Space Traders“. (I am linking to the online text of Space Traders but you can buy the book Dark Matter and read it there too, and in good company.) It’s too bad this book missed being considered (or was passed over) for a Tiptree when it first came out, and we should definitely look to nominate future books by Wright for Tiptree and other awards.

Last Day To Vote!!!

Just a reminder that the First Round of Voting on the Top Ten Obscure Works ends tonight at midnight. If you haven’t already then GO VOTE RIGHT NOW!

Book Reports ‘n’ Lolcats

It has become fashionable, especially among female novelists, to exploit the license of poetry while claiming exemption from poetry’s rigorous standards of precision and polish. Edna O’Brien is one of the writers who do this, but Annie Proulx is better known, thanks in large part to her best seller The Shipping News (1993). In 1999 Proulx wrapped up the acknowledgments in a short-story anthology titled Close Range by thanking her children, in characteristic prose, “for putting up with my strangled, work-driven ways.”

That’s right: “strangled, work-driven ways.” Work-driven is fine, of course, except for its note of self-approval, but strangled ways makes no sense on any level. Besides, how can anything, no matter how abstract, be strangled and work-driven at the same time? Maybe the author was referring to something along the lines of a nightly smackdown with the Muse, but only she knows for sure. Luckily for Proulx, many readers today expect literary language to be so remote from normal speech as to be routinely incomprehensible. “Strangled ways,” they murmur to themselves in baffled admiration. “Now who but a Writer would think of that!”

The short stories in Close Range are full of this kind of writing. “The Half-Skinned Steer” (which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, in November of 1997), starts with this sentence:

In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns.

Like so much modern prose, this demands to be read quickly, with just enough attention to register the bold use of words. Slow down, and things fall apart. Proulx seems to have intended a unified conceit, but unfurling, or spreading out, as of a flag or an umbrella, clashes disastrously with the images of thread that follow. (Maybe “unraveling” didn’t sound fancy enough.) A life is unfurled, a hustler is wound tight, a year is spooled out, and still the metaphors continue, with kicked down—which might work in less crowded surroundings, though I doubt it—and hinge, which is cute if you’ve never seen a hinge or a map of the Big Horns. And this is just the first sentence!

– B.R. Meyers, “A Reader’s Manifesto”, The Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 2007.

For obvious reasons, that essay was the first thing that I thought of when I opened The Orphan’s Tales: In The Night Garden to find this first sentence:

Once there was a child whose face was like the new moon shining on cypress trees and the feathers of waterbirds.

This pissed me off so much that I took a red pen and started underlining the passages in the book that mean absolutely nothing. Beginning with that one. Because I defy you to show me the new moon shining on anything. The new moon is a moonless night. So this is a child whose face is like a logical impossibility; but man, is that dressed up pretty with arabesques of language!

(Below find spoilers for In The Night Garden, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Air.) Continue reading »

Top Ten Obscure Books - 1st Round of Voting

After some discussion with the other FemSF bloggers it’s been decided to do the voting in two rounds. The first round to narrow it down to our shortlist of 20 books and then a second vote among those twenty.

Many people had reasons for nominating certain books so in a compromise between putting them in the poll itself (which made the poll too bulky) or not including them (which seems silencing) they are all being reprinted in this post below the cut. Like the poll itself the list below is alphabetical by first name of author. Again this is all the books that were nominated with reasons but not all the books nominated. If the work nominated was a series, it’s nominated under the name of the first book in that series with the series name in parenthesis next to it

The link is at the bottom of the post.
Vote for up to 10 works.
Get everyone you know who’s interested to vote.
Vote only once.
Poll Closes July 11th.

Go Now Vote!

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Interview with Award Winning Author Nancy Kress

Nancy Kress is one of the best SF authors in the business, her breakthrough work, the short story Beggars In Spainearned her both a Hugo and a Nebula and spawned her famous Beggars trilogy. Since then she’s kept busy writing over twenty fiction books, three books about writing, a regular column for Writers Digest and winning of multiple Nebulas including one at the ceremony held in April of this year. Her latest work, the novel Dogs which is forthcoming from Tacyhon press and she was kind enough to grant Feminist SF - the Blog an interview.

Hello Ms. Kress thank you so much for taking the time for this interview.

No, no problem at all.

So your new novel is coming out from Tacyhon press next month (July 2008) do you want to tell our readers a little about it?

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Gender blind, right…

I promise to write up my con report from WisCon really soon, mainly because that report includes a panel report from the discussion we had about the debate over Eclipse One’s cover and how marketing, ideals, and gender imbalance all played a part in the online discussion. The panel was really good and I felt a little hopeful for the future.

And then Jonathan Strahan had to go and mess it all up.

First, he announced the Eclipse Two TOC which has 14 stories total yet only 1 by a woman (Nancy Kress). Eclipse One had a 50/50 split (which made the all male cover seem particularly odd), so a collective WTF on this 90+% male second volume.

When SFSignal posted the TOC the very first comment made mention of the male-heavy offerings. Strahan then responded:

On gender issues: I try to be gender blind.

O RLY?

Further down:

For both volumes of Eclipse, about half of the invited writers didn’t deliver. [...] By weird chance, most of the women writers dropped out before the deadline and most of the men delivered. Of the stories actually delivered, some didn’t quite work for me (that happens all the time too). Again, as it happened, more submissions for women were knocked out, but only by chance.

[...] I honestly don’t think about this when buying stories. I’m not looking to achieve a gender balance. It’s great when it happens, and I’d be honestly happy if a volume in the series ended up with all female contributors, but I’m reading for great stories first, second, third, last and always.

Firstly, the gender blind argument is just about as valid as the color blind argument (as in: not so much). Secondly, it isn’t even that only one woman submitted, but only one woman’s story was accepted. Thirdly, I don’t think “by chance” really plays into it. Strahan didn’t just happen to reject those stories, he made a decision to. He also made the decision not to ask any more female authors to submit once it became clear that a large number of them weren’t going to.  If he didn’t know until the last minute, the lesson there is: widen your net casting.  And last, it’s just unacceptable to have an anthology with 13 of 14 stories by men. He’s not gender blind, unless someone is taking names off of stories before he reads them. And I and others have already addressed the nonsense about how “I’m just choosing the best stories” is a bunch of hooey. I would say that, if one ends up with 95% guys, one is not trying hard enough, but it seems Strahan isn’t trying at all.

And need I mention that, to the best of my knowledge, everyone in this anthology is white?

When books like these end up with a majority of stories by white men, it’s an indication not of color blindness, but blindness to the reality of the world. The world is not 95% white men. And neither is the SF community or readership.

Action movie previews; gendered plots and robots

Onward and backward to the previews before Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull!

The movie previews promised to be good since they would be action movies. I’m a HUGE sucker for explosions, chases, fights, and other action movie bullshit. Add space battles and I’m extra happy. So, no horrible “romantic comedy” previews I had to suffer through.

Instead I got to admire the explosions, while bitching about the Smurfette Syndrome about 5 times in a row. “The Spirit” - Frank Miller movie, made fun of preview already, hilarious voiceover with superhero going “The city screams, she is my mother, she is my lover.” (Not for the first time I mutter, “Sooo that makes you a motherfucker then?”) *sigh* So stupid! So annoying! So unnecessary! Then yet another movie about a Man having Important Man experiences with women as peripheral sex prizes (some movie about a guy living backwards in time and his romance, but mainly lots of World War I battles with vaseline-lensed sex bits mixed in with sexy-woman-tragically-aging shots. I would prefer they just LEAVE WOMEN COMPLETELY OUT, thanks but no thanks. Give explosions and battles, keep nasssty chips.)

Hellboy which looked fucking awesome!!!! Awesome! Hello! Just great! I will see it like 8 times because it looked like candy! But again, is all about a man having his Man Moments because Hollywood if it’s an action movie has to show how being a Man is all about heroism and heroism is all about being a man! I am so annoyed. I bet if the female characters have any good fighting moments of bravery it will be only because they are defending their man, or their dad, or their brother, or carrying out their father’s last wish, or some other annoying-ass thing whose subtext implies that women only exist in relation to men, especially when they kick ass.

Then, Eagle Eye, which looked to be even more of the same. It is all about the profound experience of the lone man who in his lonely way has an Experience.

Do I make myself clear, here? Why is this always the plot? It’s like the Joseph Campbell sexist as hell Hero’s Journey just mutated itself into every story possible.

Don’t even get me STARTED on Wall-e. For fuck’s sake. I mean, I want to see a fucking awesome movie about some robots. In space. Why must it get all messed up with gender stuff? Why not just put some eyelashes and lipstick and a fucking Minnie Mouse dress and bow on that rescue-screamy-flirty-sexy robot girl? WTF with the robot gender roles? You know, if I were a robot, I’d think the nicest bit of would be getting to be ungendered. Like we didn’t go far enough with the movie where all the ants were heterosexual male/female couples (??) and the Bee one, and the one where the (male) cattle had udders? What?

On gender and the racist crap in Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull

Racist crap in Indiana Jones, I know, like that’s a surprise?

I saw the Indiana Jones movie, loving it and hating it. I was steeling myself for an inevitable ancient-Harrison-Ford romance with a plucky yet needing to be rescued 24 year old actress, and indeed the movie had all the pain of Smurfette Syndrome, ie, a bunch of male characters of varying kinds and one plucky girl. BUT…. it had the saving grace of having TWO female characters. The plucky girl was older than one would expect from craptastic sexist ageist Hollywood, like actually old enough to have a young adult son, and old enough for it not to be completely stereotypically annoyingly prize-like for her to be involved with Indiana Jones (except it still was and she was objectified and prize-ified in the end). And she got to kick ass some of the time. The other female character was the totally awesome Evil Psychic Communist in uniform complete with shiny black gloves and obsession with aliens and mind control. She was okay.

There was a really stupid and unnecessary racist bit with the …. clay-covered “naked savages” springing out of the masonry to defend the temple. Why, why, why? Why was that necessary? “Insert mob of non-white naked howling irrational people here.” What??? Why?! Covered in MUD! Wearing GRASS SKIRTS! HOWLING! I believe even ULULATING! Inexplicably kept alive for 5000 years! Fanatically DEVOTED! Mayan, yet Peruvian, yet grass skirt wearing yet wielding BOLAS! Then awe-struck, and bowing to the Artifact! Arrrgh. Rook and I sat there groaning and scoffing. Come on! More skulls, giant insects, sword fights, stone mechanisms rolling shut just a hair too late, waterfalls, yes, Racist Crap no. Anyway!

The pulp-like “ooo mayans” and “ooo nazca lines” and “ooo now we’re in the amazon” was just funny and overblown. I didn’t even get annoyed by it like I did with the weird conflation of totally random bits of imaginary-Latin America-ness in Emperor’s New Groove. The geography of Crystal Skull was so bad it was hilarious. Same with the “magnetism” science!

Back to the villain - I enjoyed the bit where….

SPOILER!!!!!

Colonel Doctor Irina Spalko, our black-gloved uniformed villain, was going, “I WANT TO KNOW” and staring at the alien skeleton and the aliens began to beam stuff into her head! Yay! I wanted her to know! Go, Hero of the Order of Lenin! Go, psychic scientist crazy woman! My higher level analysis was that her gender was being conflated with communism and the “hive mind” of the aliens. Manliness was the independent thought and maverick status of Indiana Jones and his little rebel boy sidekick. Femininity though is all about the hive vagina. (Dependence or non-independence; either the plucky dependent support of Indy’s girlfriend, or a fanatic, scary devotion to one-minded unity; woman always in service and not-alone, and if not in support of a man, then she must be evil.) The communist villain spoke at length about her evil plot, which was to gain enormous psychic powers so that everyone in the world’s thoughts would be like hers, they would be taught right thinking, but they wouldn’t know it wasn’t their thoughts. They’d think they were having their own ideas - but it would be communist mind control. Then, she ended up marveling at the beauty of the alien hive mind, and merging orgasmically with it and squirting up into an interdimensional portal. THE SOCIALIST FEMINIST ALIEN HIVE MIND CANNOT EVEN EXIST IN OUR UNIVERSE. You can see why I cheered. I don’t think I was meant to and instead it was meant to be punishment or comeuppance and a fit ending. I think also the idea of women in authority, in positions of equality and authority, in communist countries, was mixed up with current (and past) anxieties about feminism, PC-ness, and women’s rights, so that woman in authority = hive mind = evil.

Reflecting us at half our natural size

Under the cut, this post contains some spoilers for the most recent episode of Doctor Who, New Who Series 4, episode 10, “Midnight”, broadcast Saturday 14th June 2008.

Nearly 80 years ago, Virginia Woolf wrote: “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man, at twice its natural size.” (A Room of One’s Own, which you should read if you haven’t already)

Dale Spender and Sally Cline picked this theme up and ran with it in 1987, Reflecting Men at Twice Their Natural Size , one of those books that I wish I had bought six of (because I keep lending it out and not getting it back).

What Woolf alludes to in passing, and what Spender and Cline spend a book outlining and dissecting, is the pattern of male/female behaviour in which women spend time and energy making men feel good about themselves: which time and energy, men do not in general reciprocate.*

I want to write about the crazy mirror of television. And of the TV series I’ve been a fan of for longer than anything else, way back since I was a little Whofan watching Tom Baker. (I am just old enough to remember some of the Elisabeth Sladen episodes when they were first broadcast: Sarah Jane Smith, journalist.)

The Doctor isn’t human, but he has always been male through all his incarnations: and while he has had male companions in his journeys, he is usually accompanied by a girl or a woman: whose function is to be Watson to his Holmes**. When I ran a poll on my journal back in 2006 about why that group “the viewers” wouldn’t accept a woman as the Doctor, several people also pointed that “the viewers” wouldn’t accept a person of oolour as the Doctor - man or woman. (I still think that accepting the Doctor could incarnate as a woman would be a bigger shift, but yeah: people moaned about Tuvok not being a “proper” Vulcan, too.)

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Nominations Have Ended

So the nominations for our “Top Ten Obscure F/SF” book list ended at midnight last night, anymore comments won’t make it onto the nomination list. We have a great list of nominations put forth by our readers and a few of the bloggers and while there was some disagreement on what exactly was meant by obscure I doubt there’s anyone who could go through the comments and know every author/book listed.

This weekend I will be going through the comments, generating the list of the books and finding a polling software I really like. The poll should be up for voting by the middle of next week.