My friend MCM is doing something very cool with his serialized, crowdsourced novel Fission Chips. Not only is he letting the readers decide what the main character should do next after every chapter, but he’s also letting people get themselves involved in the story in other ways.

The latest twist is that the main character keeps finding his business cards spread out around the city. We don’t know who’s been spreading the cards around, and neither does MCM. That’s why he’s letting the readers decide. Any reader can go here and get their own unique business card code. The goal, then, is to get as many people as possible to click onto the unique webpage that corresponds with your code. Whoever has had the most views on their business card page at the end of the story gets to have their name in the book as the perpetrator of the business card mystery!

Here’s my business card. Click it to help me win the contest!

For full details on the contest, check out the page here: http://books.1889.ca/fission/ref/.

It is Saturday night, and I am about to go to bed. As promised, I am tallying the votes for which book I get to read next.

The voting was really close this time, with some people voting in comments on the blog post and others sending me messages on Twitter with their choices, but I’ve determined the winner. The book I will be reading next, with a margin of victory of only a single vote, is

Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll.

I’ve read Alice in Wonderland before, but since they’re both so relatively small, I think I’m going to read both in sequence, so I can get the full effect out of Through the Looking Glass.

Thanks for voting!

I recently asked readers to vote on which book I should read next. Via blog comments and Twitter replies, it was determined that I should read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

I finished Brave New World last night, and it was a much better read than the Ludlum spy novel I read before it. I’m still chewing on the last few chapters and trying to decide what the point of the novel was, but I’m getting closer to an interpretation. If I come up with anything earth-shatteringly original, I’ll let you all know.

For now, I can say that I loved the book’s sociology. It’s not often that you see an author incorporate sociology into their writing, and Huxley’s approach was fairly surface-level, but he touched on a lot of sociological concepts that didn’t become mainstream until decades later. Read the rest of this entry…

I asked you to pick which book I should read next, and now that I’ve finished Apocalypse Watch, it’s time to count the votes and find out the result. Most of the votes came in over Twitter, so if you’re counting along at home, that may be why they don’t add up for you.

A few people voted for War and Peace, probably out of spite. Luckily, more people had my best interests in mind, so with nearly 60% of the vote, the book that I will be reading next is Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley.

Thanks for helping me choose, everyone. When I finish off Brave New World, I’ll put up a new list for you to choose from, and I’ll let you know my impressions of the book.

I’m nearly at the end of the somewhat tedious Robert Lublum novel I’m reading (”Apocalypse Watch”, for those keeping track at home), and I’ve got a ton of options for what to read next. I need your help!

Here’s a list of some of my options for the next book to read. All of these are available on my book shelf, and I haven’t read any of them before. I want you to leave a comment or send a tweet to @thephatbunny (tag it with #booksuggest if you want) with your pick from this list. Feel free to give a reason for your choice!

The book with the most “votes” will be the one I read next. Here’s the list:

• Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
• War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
• Planet of the Apes – Pierre Boulle
• Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
• Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
• The Mad King – Edgar Rice Burroughs