MESSAGE BOARD 2020

Time for a new message board thread. Please star this so that you don’t miss out on what we’re doing this year.

Happy New Year and may you all enjoy interesting and successful literary globe-trotting in 2020!

Our quarterly theme reads for 2020 are:
- Q1 The Rise of the Far Right in the 21st Century — moderated by LolaWalser : https://www.librarything.com/topic/315092
- Q2 "Writing from Southern Africa" — moderated by thorold https://www.librarything.com/topic/318253
- Q3 "Travelling the TBR 2.0" — your chance to catch up with everything you meant to read for the previous 20 or 30 quarterly themes...
- Q4 "Russians Write Revolutions" - fiction about the revolutionary period in Russia, roughly 1881-1922 — moderated by SassyLassy

As usual, additional volunteers to help moderating the themes would be most welcome.

Watch this space for links to the individual threads. I’ll update the Group page shortly as well.

>2 thorold:

Oh, I just saw this--I hope you don't mind the thread title I chose, "fascism is back" was more how I described the topic, didn't think of it as the actual title--a little too fanfare-y/alarmist?... although now that I think of it, it probably would have drawn more eyeballs!

>3 LolaWalser: No problem, I’ll use the thread title when I update the group page. Should be able to do that and make some sort of considered contribution to the thread itself in a couple of days when I’m home and able to get back to typing on an actual keyboard instead of a phone.

The thread for the Q2 Southern Africa theme read is up, and will be open for your contributions from 1 April. Please feel free to have a look if you want some reading ideas to get you going : https://www.librarything.com/topic/318253

There are still a few days of Q1 left to read one last book about the rise of the far right, though...

Oops, put this on the wrong message board. Deleted.

Just a reminder that June is nearly over, but you've still got a few days to finish that book you'd been planning to read for the Q2 Southern Africa theme read!

But don't panic, we'll be moving on to "Travelling the TBR 2.0" in Q3, so there will be plenty of scope for catching with that and all our other previous theme reads.

The thread for "Travelling the TBR 2.0" is now up, at https://www.librarything.com/topic/321973

Don't forget to finish those Southern Africa books first :-)

...and we're almost in October. SassyLassy has the thread for the Q4 theme read ready to go here:

- October to December 2020: "Russians Write Revolutions" - fiction about the revolutionary period in Russia, roughly 1881-1922

Obviously, we're all burning to get those hefty Russian tomes down off the shelf, but that doesn't necessarily have to mean we abandon the onslaught on the rest of the global TBR pile!

Just in case anyone has this thread starred and hasn’t spotted the other one, a heads-up that I opened a nominations thread for next year’s theme reads a week or so ago here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/326147

A small cabal of Reading Globally insiders (!) has already planted a few interesting proposals in the nominations thread; if you want an input to the decision-making process, please drop by and leave your proposals there as well. I’m planning to close nominations around the end of the first week of December, then we’ll have a poll if we’ve got more than four proposals (at present I think we have exactly four).

thx for the heads up!!! Ill be there

The nominations for 2021 quarterly threads have now closed, and it looks as though we are poised for a lively poll, with fifteen candidates fighting for four places.

Vote early and vote often, so that we get a clear result!

Voting thread for 2021 Quarterly Topics: https://www.librarything.com/topic/327031

Just a reminder that the polls for the new quarterly threads close on Monday, 14 December, around noon GMT. Reading Globally has 1704 members currently, and so far no topic has been voted on (for and against) by more than fourteen members.

If you're happy that those fourteen people should choose next year's topics on your behalf, that's fine: if not, vote here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/327031
There's a print-it-yourself "I've voted" sticker at the bottom of the thread.

Many thanks to all who nominated topics and/or voted: it's great to see how many people got involved this time.

The detailed results are on the planning thread (https://www.librarything.com/topic/326147#7342939).

The four topics for 2021 will be:

— Writing from small countries (9 votes) — Q1 theme, to be hosted by spiralsheep
— The Lusophone world: writing from countries where Portuguese is or was an important language (11 votes)
— Translation prize winners (10 votes)
— Childhood: Books for or about children in different cultures around the world (9 votes)

If you'd like to offer to help by (co-)hosting any of these topics, please see the planning thread or message me privately.
The volunteer for "small countries" got in first and reserved Q1; dates for the others can be decided when we have hosts.

January to March 2021's quarterly theme

Notes from a Small Population: 40+ places with under 500,000 inhabitants

is here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/327232#n7343260