Poll: Summer Project Ideas

EDIT: The poll is now a Google Form embedded below. Sorry for the terrible Blogger poll. I have learned my lesson. And if the embed doesn't work, here's a link.

Hello, party people! As longtime readers of this blog will surely know, I usually do some sort of long-form project during the summers. In the past, I've blogged through AFI's top 100 movies list, the Chronicles of Narnia, and His Dark Materials (I missed summer of 2016 because I was busy moving and stuff). I've had a lot of fun doing these projects, and people seem to enjoy them, too, so why break tradition now?

Well. This year, I thought I'd shake up the format a tad by allowing you dear readers to help me decide which project to do this summer (still 1.5 months away, I know, but the weather is getting warmer, my students are getting antsier, and I can practically taste June). I've created a poll with four possible summer projects, and you—yes, you—get to vote on which one I do.

The Projects:

1. Sufjan Stevens: So for years, people have been telling me how great Sufjan Stevens is. I didn't exactly doubt them, but I also never really sought out his stuff. But then Call Me By Your Name happened, and around the same I ran across "Impossible Soul," and you know what? It turns out people were totally right! Sufjan's amazing. If I do this project, I'll blog through each of his studio albums as a way of jumping headfirst into his discography.

2. Earthsea: Ursula K. Le Guin just died, which has got me nostalgic about the Earthsea books. I haven't read any of them in years, and I only ever read the first three, so this would be just as much revisiting as it would be discovering. But I envision this as roughly analogous to my Narnia and Dark Materials projects as another entry in my "Revisiting Fantasy Lit" series.

3. Disney: I recently did the whole "March Madness" bracket thing, just with Disney movies, and that got me thinking about how much I both love and hate these things. So what if I blogged through all the Disney animated features, starting with Snow White and going all the way through Moana? This would be more in the style of the AFI project, where I cover multiple movies in each post in a more-or-less blurby fashion. It would also involve me catching up with some of the Disney movies I haven't seen (there are maybe a dozen) / revisiting ones I haven't seen in a while.

4. Best Picture: So for this, I'd go through each year of the Academy Awards and make a post about the Best Picture nominees each year—which movie won, whether I think it deserved to, etc. This would involve a ton of new watching on my part, and I'm not even sure that all the BP nominees are still available to see. But I'd try!

The poll will stay open until 12:01 AM on May 1. And of course, none of these would replace my normally weekly reviews posts either (or the ever-rarer Prog Progress posts either, for the three of you who read those). So even if you hate these options, you'll at least still have the regular stuff I do.

Anyway, democracy reigns! Cast your vote! And if the embed doesn't work, here's a link.