Poll

To help people choose a first story – we can and will come to others – here’s a tiny bit about each of those in the poll, listed below in publication order:

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
Layers of fact and fiction: the nature of truth and time.

The Circular Ruins
A circular story about dreaming reality.

The Lottery in Babylon
Disorienting paradoxes musing on fate.

The Library of Babel
Paradoxes related to an infinite library.

The Garden of the Forking Paths
Paths don’t always fork in a literal, concrete sense. Espionage, as well!

Funes, The Memorious, aka Funes, His Memory
The blessing, curse and consequences of perfect memory.

The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero
Life imitating art.

Death and the Compass
A quadrilateral, circular story and multiple-murder mystery.

The Secret Miracle
Hard to describe without giving too much away or projecting my own ideas.

The South
The magic of stories and what sort of death one would choose, if one could.

The Immortal
What price immortality? A quest, books, time/history.

Emma Zunz
Hard to describe without giving too much away or projecting my own ideas. Unusual in JLB’s oeuvre for having a strong and central female character.

The Zahir
Time, obsession, madness.

The Aleph
A man obsessed with a dead woman, and a mysterious object.

Everything and Nothing
An agonising vignette of aching emptiness, with a twist.

Borges and I / The Other / August 25th, 1983
Duality, identity, self – past and future.

The Other
What do you wish your future self could tell your younger self?
Similar to "August 25th, 1983", and "Borges and I".

The Congress
The mysterious and secretive Congress of the World.

A Weary Man’s Utopia
A glimpse of the future.

Thank you, Cecily!
As Cecily has picked up, I made an error or two in the poll. I apologize. I was distracted while setting up the poll, by trying to find out if there is a way for each member to have 5 votes instead of only one, but sadly GR polls are apparently not equipped to accommodate multiple choices.

Unfortunately, one cannot edit the poll once posted, so we'll just have to live with the mistakes, sorry!

As you can see, I posted The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero as two separate choices, so you can choose either of them, they were meant to be one title, sorry about that!

Then we had decided to put the 3 stories "Borges and I" , "The Other" and "August 25th, 1983" into one thread although they are separate stories, because they have a similar theme. So if you like any of those stories, vote for them, they will all be included in the same thread. :)

Thank you, everyone, and a special thanks to Cecily.

The discussions are here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/group...

Oh golly, we might as well do pretty much all of the listed stories eventually, hm? We have 15 stories chosen by members so far, which seems like a good number.

Hello everyone, voting ends tonight at midnight GMT, and since we've been flying around and been away on vacation and flights have been delayed and so forth, the first two threads might only be up by Tuesday.

But watch this space and the convening thread in the next 2 days for links!