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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 9887353" data-attributes="member: 6799660">Note that the article is reporting on a list ranking on Goodreads. Not a literary analysis, review of overall popularity*, a ranking (where you specifically put one book above another), or even a timed survey (where people have an incentive to rally their like-minded friends to get a vote in before a time limit). Just a list where an editor posits a category, people can nominate any book** in the category, and then Goodread members upvote them (and it looks like you can upvote as many as you want, so you voting for RP1 does not mean you cannot do the same for Old Man’s War) in an ongoing basis. All we know is that more people that care to do this process clicked for RP1 than any of the others. It is a very special kind of popularity contest -- one where having the most people that say 'oh yeah, I think I kind of liked that, I'll give it a thumbs-up' is the dominant measure of success.*or of purchase, if discussing the book from a sales/economic perspective.**with at least 1000 overall ratings. Note also that the reporting of this as newsworthy is an article in Parade -- the pamphlet quasi-magazine included in Sunday papers in the middle with the sales ads. So kind of weighted in audience towards younger boomers and older gen-Xers (people who still get physical newspapers) -- the same people nostalgic for when Spielberg and Back to the Future were the biggest of deals that made Ready Player One a success. Mind you, Parade did not make RP1 end up at the top of that list. However, someone there saw that it had and decided that this was an article waiting to happen. None of this is meant to diminish the actual book Ready Player One. It was... fine, I guess. Certainly not my idea of epic or enduring literature, but not actively worse than whatever Michael Crichton novel probably would have held a similar position on a similar list when I was growing up. My point is more that it being at the top of this list does not prove anything particularly grand and informative about the state of science fiction or of reading audiences.</blockquote>

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