"Ferretbrain, ."

I think merely the fact that you have to qualify it as being

Not wanting to complain, but that's two episodes now where you've posted the result in the first comment, and some people might prefer it to be a surprise. If you could use Rami's lovingly-coded spoiler tags, that would be good.

Errr, editorial fu applied....

Thoughts on finishing the finalists (provided in order of how many pages we had left to go through at the end of the contest):

The Color Purple:

Cotillion:

Gaudy Night:

Damn. I apologize, and I promise that it won't happen again. I didn't even think about that.

Gosh, don't worry about it. I'm so blase about spoilers in general that it seems a bit hypocritical to whinge about the Text Factor.

Also: WE KILLED DUMBLEDORE.

ROSEBUD IS MY SLED.

Gandalf comes back from the dead.

And it turns out he never actually died because in fact he's an angel/demigod sent by the good archangels/gods who serve God/Eru Iluvatar to...

Oh, wait, that's not comically obvious enough is it?

Dumbledore dies?

THANKS FOR RUINING THE NAME OF THE WIND FOR ME >:(

VADER IS FRODO'S DAD.

THE BALROG IS HIS SISTER.

The only reason I mentioned is it that I felt a competition with yer'actual voting and suspense and unexpectedness was potentially a bit different from plot spoilers, like some people care about hearing match results before they've seen the game,* but it's not a big deal.

*That is, other people, who care about sports.

Having read Color Purple and Gaudy Night (and not Cotillion, but other Heyer books in the same vein), this has been a really great TeXt factor!

I have to say though, now that I can be all spoilery (with nice spoiler tags) , I kept having to bite my tongue...er, sit on my hands when Gaudy Night came up. For example, when people mentioned that , I kept thinking of a few chapters later when . Rarely have I hated a villain as completely after that section. Also, in this episode, where Gaudy Night is nobly defended as "just a very fine mystery novel," I really wished the show could have gone just a tad longer, since . But alas, twas not to be.

Also, KVOTHE IS THE LORD OF THE RINGS!

Who are these mythical people who care about sports? ;-)

Rarely have I hated a villain as completely after that section.

Yeah, Poison Pen is completely vile. Though what I also found interesting was that

So by the end of the novel my feelings about PP were complicated because

Also

@Arthur B: I'm pretty sure his mortal form does die, he just gets resurrected.

But isn't it fairly strongly hinted that his mortal form is just a shell he uses so people don't go HOLY SHIT AN ANGEL wherever he goes? There's the bit where he threatens Bilbo with a sight of "Gandalf the Grey uncloaked", which I was fairly sure referred to that. Or flashing.

Great point, Arthur. I think that the ambiguous, non-victory feeling at the ending is sort of the point - the gender politics and so messed up and so internalized by both men and women that fighting them is a nasty, messy business - but a vitally important one. Plus, that's not really the ending - the ending is the lovely lovely Latin bits :-)

And that villain speech is really, really amazingly well done. So completely emotionally wringing and uncomfortable.

Well, with Ian McKellan playing Gandalf, it's probably flashing, given his Lear. :-)

Well if we're talking the movies he isn't an angel because the studios didn't have the rights to use any material from the Silmarillion...

Unfortunately, that didn't stop them...

Jamie and I think that a Sondheim adaptation of 'Cotillion' would be awesome. We are going to write it ourselves somehow. I don't really know how it's going to work, but we imagine that it will involve a song about Kitty not wanting to be a dowd, a few antagonistic duets between dudes in tight breeches, and frequent interjections of 'I'm an Earl!'

Also: why, Arthur, I would never put anything like that in my cookies! (●ᴗ●)....

There needs to be a song called "Nobody asked you, George!" reminiscent of "Green Eggs and Ham" (which I only discovered recently, but now I understand so many more things).

Actually, the stuff about Gandalf being an angel is all in LotR (if you include the appendices), though I can understand why it doesn't really come up in the movies. I don't mean that he dies qua angelic self (that self can't die), just the physical body.

Inkeyes, if you do not make this happen I may never again know true joy.

I'm still waiting for Jamie Reads... to appear on the market. I bet we could IndieGoGo that.

Finally got around to reading Cotillion, and while I didn't like it as much as Friday's Child, it was delightful. I think for me, Heyer is delightful in smallish, slightly spread out chunks - it's taken me a month after finishing Cotillion to get started on The Grand Sophy, which I checked out at the same time from the library.

Also, her mystery novels aren't nearly as good as her Regency romances. Despite the fact that Dorothy Sayers said she loved them. I can't see why - Sayers' Lord Peter novels blow them so far out of the water they almost seem like the very concept of "being in the water" is out of the question.

But Cotillion is delightful - Freddy most particularly, though I loved Kitty as well. Sophy is rapidly creeping up on Freddy for "awesome person who knows what's what and not to mention is super hot and knows how to wear clothes and drive horses" in my book, however.

Not only did I listen to this on the first day of 2012, I listened to it back-to-back with Episode 9, rather than a week later.

It's like you predicted how I would hear it all, or something.