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I was not advocating for one or the other - either would work, though they would work differently. I just thought it had already been decided. Sorry I wasn't clear!
At the moment I'd struggle to think of three nominations so I'd rather pick from a heap of everyone's books and each put 1/2/3 score ratings into the mix. We already have a decent number of recommendations and it seems good to me to make use of them for November's choice.
Does that mean someone might have to run a book they didn't vote for?
I'd imagined that @Apocryphal meant the process was:
1) The book nominations go into a heap
2) we all allocate 1/2/3 scores to them
3) some book comes out as selected
4) whoever first nominated that book runs it
I actually didn't think as far as step 4 so it's a good question, but that makes sense to me.
Whatever the method, we can try if for a while and see how it goes. If we don't like it, we change.
That sounds like a reasonable method to try.
I guess we should set this up - doesn't look like there are anymore nominations. Here are the nominated books, arranged alphabetically.
Please rank them in the order you'd most like to read them (most liked = 1, least liked = 7). The book with the lowest overall score will be our next book. I think all of these books should not be too hard to get, but please check for yourself before voting.
(A) Ancient Sorceries: The Adventures of John Silence by Algernon Blackwood, 1908. This is the name of the Penguin Weird Fiction edition of 2024, but the book is also known as John Silence, or John Silence: Physician Extraordinary.
It's a collection that features case notes and reports of John Silence, a sort of occult Sherlock Holmes character, and one of the earliest such characters.
(B) Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherry, 1981. One of her most popular and famous novels, it features wartime space station hijinks. It won the 1982 Hugo.
(C) Erewhon by Samuel Butler, 1872. A piece of utopian satire that explores the rise of 'thinking machines'. It has been quite influential, even inspiring Dune's 'Butlerian Jihad'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon
(D) The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle,1912. An early piece of SF by the creator of Sherlock Holmes and featuring Professor Challenger, one of his most famous characters, as he goes on a voyage of discovery.
(E) The Magnificent Showboats of the Lower Vissel River, Lune XXIII South Big Planet AKA Showboat World by Jack Vance, 1975. Enter the cut-throat world of competing showboats as they ply the Lower Vissel river, heading toward a competition for fame and fortune.
(F) Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock, 1984. A man returns home from the war only to find his brother has fallen under some kind of influence in the ancient Ryhope Wood near their ancestral home. This is another book of enormous influence, exploring the relevance of myth.
(G) Podkayne of Mars by Robert Heinlein, 1962. One of Heinlein's 'juvenile' novels, this one follows the precocious 15-year-old, Podkayne (and her even younger and more precocious brother, Clark) as they travel from Mars to Earth with their uncle. Apparently, there's a new release of this with Heinlein's preferred original ending (and not the ending the publisher or editor insisted he write, which intentionally somewhat dulled the impact of the book).
I have read all but two of these, but not for decades. I seriously don't see how we could go wrong with any of them! This is going to takes some thinking...