Porthaven: Mailing List
Some threads recommended by list readers
About the books
- An analysis of Fire and Hemlock's Polly and Tom
- Fire and Hemlock: Reconsidered
- resurrection, rebirth, and death in DWJ
- teaching Dark Lord of Derkholm, and then more on teaching Dark Lord of Derkholm.
About the people on the list
- A silly survey (follow the thread).
About the list
The Diana Wynne Jones discussion list is for discussions of Diana Wynne Jones and her work. As with many Internet mailing lists, discussion are bound to range far off topic, but let's please try to keep ourselves moderately grounded in DWJ. That is, if you absolutely must share your Uncle Harold's blackened chicken recipe, try to connect it with the dreadful school food in Witch Week. That being said, we do talk about food an awful lot!
Please feel free to introduce yourself after you subscribe! We are a friendly bunch.
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Questions, comments to dwj-owner@suberic.net. The Diana Wynne Jones web page is at http://suberic.net/dwj/.
About the List Members
at the end of 2001, Ania ran a questionnaire amongst the list members to discover our demographics. Here are the results, in her words (mildly edited by Deborah 4 July 2002):
In the religion question I counted the current religion - or lack thereof - not the family background, e. g. my own entry was: "Atheist. Was Catholic." and it counts once only, under "none". I had a bit of a dilemma in subdividing the Christian varieties and I decided to keep it simple and have Catholic, E. Orthodox and Protestant, which covers the rest. Likewise, I did not presume to subdivide Judaism, because I don't know enough about it and besides, some people just put down "Jewish" and others qualified it. Anyway, here goes:
- 48 people replied, 6 men and 42 women
- The youngest is 15; the oldest, 55.
- Our total age is 1477 years.
- Our average age is just under 31.
- We have spawned 25 children (that's about half a child each), but....
- 34 of us have no children.
- Top 3 countries of origin are: USA - 26; UK - 10; Oz - 7. Ireland had 2; there was one each from Israel, Germany, Finland, Poland, Fiji, Canada, Sweden and Holland
- Most - but not all - of us still live in the country of origin.
- The religious outnumber the non-religious; results were: atheist 11; agnostic 8; Pagan 1; Jewish 6; Eastern orthodox 1; Catholic 4; Protestant 17 (includes a Quaker, 2 Mormons, assorted Church of England/Ireland/Scotland, a Methodist, Unitarians, Episcopalians and others)
- 15 of us are students or still at school; 5 are librarians; 11 work with/in computers; 12 have other occupations connected with learning and books (teachers, editors, translators, writers); 4 came under "other" occupations (and those were: archaeologist, electrical engineer, chartered accountant, cartographer) And 1 is an Actuary and I have NO idea what that means.
- First DWJ.
- Charmed Life a clear winner!
- CL- 18
- Dogsbody- 8
- Witch Week- 5
- LoCC- 4
- ToTC and Archer's Goon- 3
- Ogre and Cart and Cwidder- 2
- Homeward Bounders, TotG, Hexwood, 8DoL and Howl - 1
- Quintessential DWJ.
-
CL wins again.
- CL- 11
- AG- 10
- HMC- 6
- F&H- 5
- TotG and DS- 4
- ToTC and LoCC- 3
- HBs, Hex, 8DoL, SWM, Dk Lord and Magicians of Caprona- 1
- Favourite DWJ
-
Most people had more than one fave; they are all taken into
account equally.
F&H is the winner by a large margin, though DS was a strong
challenger.
- F&H- 29
- DS- 21
- HMC- 14
- Hex- 11
- AG and HBs- 7
- CL and LoCC- 6
- Drowned Ammet and Po3- 3
- Spellcoats, ToTC, C&Cw, CoD, 8DoL, MoC - 2
- Dogsbody, Ogre, SWM, Dk Lord, YotG, Changeover- 1
- 2 people chose the same book - CL - in all 3 categories.
- 4 respondents thought of their first DWJ as the quintessential one (CL-3, TotG-1)
- Many had the same quintessential and favourite: F&H- 5, HMC and DS- 3, LoCC and AG- 2, HBs and Hex- 1
- The first stayed on as favourite in 7 cases: LoCC- 2, 8DoL, ToTC, AG, CL, Hex- 1