Join us for a bookish scavenger hunt and #loveyourshelfie. Do it for love, for fun, and for research!
Updated to add: Book Thingo has a list of books in challenge available on Goodreads and Riffle.
It’s nearly the first of December, and that means a few things.
First, Christmas decorations are FINALLY appropriate, even though they’ve been up since, like, August.
Second, it might actually get above 20 degrees in Hobart (I hope, anyway).
Third, the Summer of Romance is about to begin!
The Summer of Romance is a research project on the significance of paperback Harlequin Mills & Boon novels in contemporary Australian literary culture, being conducted by four scholars from the University of Tasmania. Two of us will be familiar to listeners of the Book Thingo podcast: Dr Lisa Fletcher, who’s one of the chief investigators on the Genre Worlds Australian Research Council Discovery Project, and yours truly, the official academic correspondent/Bachelor/ette devotee for Book Thingo. We’ve been joined by Dr Kathleen Williams and Kurt Temple for this project, and, we hope, we’ll be joined by you!
Between 1 December 2016 and 1 March 2017, we’re asking people to contribute to our study by joining us in a scavenger hunt for category romance novels. On our website, we’ve posted a list of the fifty Mills & Boon titles we’re searching for for. They’re all by Australian authors and were published between 1996 and 2016.
What we want to know is where paperback romance novels end up, so we’re asking you to help us track this select group of them down in the wild. ‘The wild’ here could be anywhere: nowhere is off limits!
It’s super easy to participate, and you can do so as many times as like. All you need to do is this:
1. Find one of the books on our list.
2. Take a shelfie of it where you find it — context is important!
3. Share your shelfie on one of our three social media streams (Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram), with a description of where you found it.
It’s as easy as that!
Our three social media platforms are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. If you choose to use Facebook for your shelfies, please post them directly to our Facebook page. If you use Twitter or Instagram, please use the hashtag #loveyourshelfie.
This is the kind of project that’s going to be fascinating to participate in and/or to follow, so please like/follow/whatever us on your chosen social media platform/s. And remember — nowhere is off limits! If you find one (or more) of these books somewhere, we want to know about it. And hey, maybe you can find all fifty…
If you have any questions about the project and how to participate, feel free to leave them in the comments here, or you can ask us via any of our three social media platforms!