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Last week, I broke down and got the Hugo Voter Packet after John Scalzi mentioned it on his blog. It contains electronic copies of all the fiction works in the four major categories (Best Novel, Novelette, Novella, and Short Story), Best Related Work, Best Graphic Story, and excerpts and samples of much of the rest of the categories (minus, naturally, Best Dramatic Presentation), all for the price of a supporting membership to AussieCon 2010 (worked out to $65 and change in 'Murrican money and not them funny Aussie dollars). (Which means I'm not going to attend, but I'm eligible to vote on the Hugos.)

So far I've read Hope-in-the-Mist, a biography of Hope Mirrlees, the author of Lud-in-the-Mist, a seminal work of fantasy that seems to have inspired enough fantasy authors that when I finally got my hands on a copy and read it, it was an anticlimax because I'd heard it hyped up too much. :) I've also gotten partway through The Inter-Galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children’s and Teens’ Science Fiction, and my reactions are, at the moment, mixed, and I can't really put a finger on why.

The Kindle is getting a workout - sleary pointed to calibre, a free ebook converter which allowed me to put everything on the Kindle even the on that came with DRM on it, although I had to do something else first ;). Formatting's a bit messed up, but nothing's perfect and as I've got Adobe Acrobat Pro and Word, I suspect I could have fixed a lot of the formatting issues if I cared to.

Anyway! Go! Look at the list of nominees and tell me what I should read next and why! :)

(Also, I am now eligible to nominate for next year's Hugos, so if there's a book published this year that you think deserves a nod, let me know and I'll consider getting hold of it and reading it. :)

VERY IMPORTANT POLL

I have a BURNING DESIRE TO KNOW if something I observed in my middle- and high-school days holds true elsewhere. This poll refers to situations in which you are carrying school books/notebooks/etc in the arms, and NOT in backpacks, bags, etc.

The first poll is for people who went to middle/high school equivalents in the U.S. The second is for those who went to middle/high school equivalents elsewhere in the world. If you attended both U.S. and non-U.S. school, feel free to answer both polls.

Sorry for the lack of the usual silly otherwise, but hey, I can't be terribly witty all the time.

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Also!

I have a VERY IMPORTANT POLL on LJ about binary gender differences in the way books are carried in middle and high school.

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21 minutes on the Wii Fit. I forgot to put the pedometer on, so I'll arbitrarily assume I walked for 1.5 miles because that will get me to Lothlorien. Total: 858 mi. From Rivendell: 462 mi. Oh look! I'm here with Celeborn and Galadriel!

(no subject)

Apologies if I don't reply to your comment on the poll in my previous post - they're all interesting, but I am feeling overwhelmed. XD

I am fascinated by the gender divide in book-carrying styles, and how it seems to be fairly strong - there are some of you who didn't notice a strong correlation between gender and carrying styles in your school. Several of you commented that style A - arm straight down, books against hip - seemed more unstable than style B - cradling them on hip/against chest. Which seems to be true, and may be one of the reasons guys, who tend to have larger hands than girls, carry them that way. Hm.

I think I might want to come up with a few more questions, such as seeing if it's the same globally or if it changes regionally in slightly smaller areas than "US" and "not US", and work on the gender-specifying language a bit more, and find out if people got flack for carrying them the "wrong" way, etc., and put it into another survey format to make it wider. (And find a good free online survey builder that will let me get a lot of responses. SurveyMonkey's free thing only stores 1000, which is probably way more than I'll actually get. I need to check Google Docs and see how elaborate I can get the survey function to get...)

ETA: KwikSurveys looks pretty good, actually. Anyone interested in the subject enough to help me write it up? :D