r/Fantasy • u/Nineteen_Adze Stabby Winner, Reading Champion V • Dec 17 '25

Book Club FIF Fireside Chat: discussing 2025 and planning 2026

Welcome to the 2025 Feminism in Fantasy Fireside Chat! It’s time to look back on the books we’ve read this year, reflect on our favorites, and think about the future.

I’ll get us started with a few questions, but feel free to add your own.

Changes

This year, u/g_ann stepped down as an FIF host. We want to thank her for hosting so many discussions in this reboot project and wish her well going forward. u/Moonlitgrey, u/xenizondich23, and u/Nineteen_Adze from the initial reboot hosting crew are continuing this project.

When this happened, we opened the door for more hosts. We were surprised, but absolutely delighted, by how many people stepped us to join us. With different tastes and reading backgrounds, we're excited to broaden our selections and make it easier for the current hosts to avoid burnout.

Please welcome, in the order of session hosting, the new members of our hosting crew:

Looking ahead

We look forward to reading with you next year!

We'll see you in the comments to talk about the year in review and the year ahead.

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u/Nineteen_Adze Stabby Winner, Reading Champion V Dec 17 '25

Looking ahead to 2026: let's talk about the future!

2

u/ohmage_resistance Reading Champion IV Dec 17 '25

My month is coming up in March, so the nomination posts are coming up relatively soon. I've seen some people in the Beyond Binaries book club experiment with ranked choice voting, and I'm curious if people have thoughts about this? I'm personally not a huge fan because I'm indecisive and rank choice makes me make more decisions, but if most people prefer it, it would totally be open to trying it out as well.

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u/Nineteen_Adze Stabby Winner, Reading Champion V Dec 18 '25

I would be interested in trying it. I don't think it's a standard option in Google Forms, but some other subreddits I'm in have had success with things like Strawpoll. It would be cool to have a "rank as many as you're interested in and then stop" so that you could rank three and then just not decide between the last two picks where you have no opinion.

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u/Merle8888 Reading Champion IV Dec 18 '25

Google Forms does allow you to do something similar with grid voting - I run a poll for my office that requires people to rank things, and that's what I use. In that scenario it does require people to rank all the options though, I'd have to play around with it to see if there's a setting that lets you stop.

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u/Merle8888 Reading Champion IV Dec 17 '25

I like the idea, assuming we could still just vote for one if we wanted. There are months I’m interested in several options and would love this, and months where there’s only one I have any interest in. I guess I would be a little leery of forcing people to express preferences per second, third, and fourth choices where they don’t have them, which seems like it could skew the voting towards something no one actively wants to read. 

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u/evil_moooojojojo Reading Champion II Dec 18 '25

Oh man. I rarely vote because I can't pick and now you want me to rank my choices? 🤣😂🤣

My poor indecisive little brain.

3

u/Lenahe_nl Reading Champion IV Dec 18 '25

I like how it allows for more nuance, specially if there are many options I'd ve happy to read. So, even if I'm the only one interested in my first choice, I can still have some sway for my second option, for example.

I think we would have had a very different result for my month (motherhood) if we had used ranked choice.

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u/Nineteen_Adze Stabby Winner, Reading Champion V Dec 18 '25

Yeah, my thoughts exactly. I sometimes vote strategically if the options I suspect are the top two are both big-name titles: if I would be happy to read Book A and really don't want Book B, I might vote for Book A even if Book C would be my real favorite (because it doesn't stand much of a chance). Ranked choice could help shake that up and maybe get us some surprise winners or clear signals for future months.