muninnhuginn | Why the Ravens Avoid Filling in Forms

or, further squawking on best-loved book nominations

Well, we could join in and nominate a book. Find something truly wonderful, that we love, that would boggle a very tiny bit whoever it is who deals with this (though probably it's entirely automated in its early stages so that only some anonymous server somewhere touches the data--but, hey, even the computer deserves the occasional laugh). So, struggling with the tiny print on the purple background (ugh!), we read the following:

"We're searching for Britain's best-loved fiction across television, radio, online and interactive services."

Hangabout, we thought, weren't we looking for a book here? Oops! It's the search that spans the media not the object of the inquiry. Our mistake: we tripped over your word order a little. Pardon our literal-mindedness.

With that first hurdle negotiated--just clipped the bar with our heels,--we headed, so as to avoid further confusion, to the rules. Point one was clear enough: we have to choose our BEST-LOVED BOOK (apologies for shouting: the capitals are theirs). No problem, except we're not monogamous. But point two! Now that's a humdinger:

"This must be a novel."

Our best-loved book must be a novel? What if it's not? (Currently, we'd be leaning towards one of several volumes of poetry as our "desert island" book, probably WS's Sonnets.) Well that's us told. The rest seems reasonable enough. Who, we wonder has been given the task of going out and checking as to whether a series has been published in a single volume or not (points 8, 9 and 10): this seems a little picky (hark at that!) since obviously some longer connected series, Dance to the Music of Time?, haven't made it into a single volume (thank goodness, think of the strained wrists!), whilst others have. The really interesting point is their choice of example: Harry Potter, LOTR and (evidently they were stretching themselves, here) The Alexandria Quartet. So we know what they think the winners are going to be, don't we?

Oh, and despite the fact it's being billed as "the country's" favourite read, we're not told which country and, since there's no requirement to fill in which region you live in, we guess anyone can vote. Martians are out of luck, though: the implication of "a novel from anywhere in the world" rather prevents you from voting on your indigenous works!

Hah! Going back to the introductory page, we've broken it already! In the Tell us what your best-loved book is! section, they mention Winnie-the-Pooh, a character not a book for starters. They might be well-loved, they might well be popular, but the two volumes of stories about Pooh are collections of short stories, aren't they? Not a novel or a series of novels? Pardon our higgorance here: it's a while since we read, and disliked, them. Hah! we repeat jubilantly. Got you!

Onwards to the nomination form itself. White and pink on purple, ugh, we protest again. Purple prose, yes, but that's not meant to be literal. Here goes.

Title, fine. For the sake of argument, we'll go with the Bible (a novelization, if not pure fiction, and all its books have been published in a single volume) Author? Well, some works of fiction are anonymous and this field's compulsory. Oops! Moses? Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Paul? Sighs, the first bit's done.

The dropdowns in About you and the book are fortunately not mandatory. A little inflexible, in our opinion, for an open question such as "Why did you read it?" which does not give you the possibility of the multiplicity of reasons that cause us to read and reread the best books. We're confused about how to answer how long we took to read it: the period of time over which the book was read or the total time actually engaged in reading it? Well, proceed: we're getting there, slowly.

You should read this book because comes next. Should? Bit authoritarian here, aren't we? We'd suggest you rephrase the question.

And now we run into problems again. This time choosing an adjective to describe the book. Apparently, since we have check boxes here, we can actually choose more than the implied one. (We can indeed-y.) But what an impoverished list! We're not permitted to add our own descriptions, either. Limited responses to what is, really, an open question forced into a closed format. For what purpose, we wonder. Well, at least when we get to specifying where we like to read, we have an "other" choice. However... before we reach that we stumble again. Now, sure, we understand that there's no order explicitly given in a list of choices like this, but implicitly when an item starts with the word "other" it follows it has to stand in some form of opposition to something else, and the obvious assumption for those of us who habitually read down the page is that "Other public places" relates to the previous items in the list. So we have, for the terminally literal of mind, the prospect of our beds, front rooms, loos and baths being in the public domain. We blush in retrospective embarrassment. The first option, too, puts us in a quandary: we do read on public transport. We don't like reading on public transport, but it's a consolation in the midst of train/bus/coach misery that we can.

We're onto the home strait, now. We can answer the source of our book acquisitions question, but we'd like to answer "all of the above" and can't. We can even roughly work out how many novels we've read during the last year (good thing it doesn't include books read out loud to Looby Loo or maybe it should. Add the three times through The Lion, Witch and The Wardrobe, the couple of times through most of the rest of the Narnia books [now have the Narnia novels appeared in a single volume or not?]). Name, rank and number, fine. I don't have to tell them, so I shan't. Done.

Submit.

Well, now you might understand why we hate filling in forms. Or you may, sensible person, you, have skipped the silliness.