Hi all;

Sorry for the delays. I haven't had as much access to a computer due to a family emergency. Next month will be run more smoothly.

The results of the polls can be viewed here. We ended up have a few ties, so I will give you the selections in each category and then, as needed, go through my rationale for choosing one over the other.

The winners are:

• Light Reading : The Princess Bride by William Goldman.
• Non-fiction : The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan
• Fiction : Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood
• Wild Card : Dawn by Octavia Butler

There was some pretty close competition between a lot of pairs of books, and sometimes it wasn't until the end that one pulled ahead of another. So I hope that if you nominated a book that didn't get read this time, you'll nominate it again in the future.

As for my tiebreaker decisions, they are as follows:

• Nonfiction: I chose The Girls of Atomic City over Princesses Behaving Badly simply because the AskWomen book club is reading the latter, and I figured it would be better to have different opportunities here. This is definitely the reason why and it has nothing to do with the fact that I'm a physicist who thought this book looked cool, nope nope.
• I chose Lady Oracle over One Hundred Years of Solitude for entirely gendered reasons; the former has a female author. I don't know that I will make every choice on the same basis, and I'm sure we will end up reading the latter in the foreseeable future.

I hope this doesn't put a strain on anyone, and no one should feel obligated to read more books just to keep up with any given month. Discussion of any book is welcome here.