Goodreads has launched the opening round for their yearly awards for the best books just recently. I skimmed through the categories myself, yet already saw quite mixed reviews about the suggestions for this year’s nominees.
Some categories like poetry and children books were removed (yeah, you can say that children ain’t a target audience for the Goodreads yet this platform always seemed to be well rounded).
Graphic novels is also something that was removed unfortunately. Although these ain’t my cup of tea, I’m almost sure it must be upsetting for a large group of people.
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It would be nice to see them scrap all the categories take the 100 or so most read books this year, toss out any under 3 star and then make categories that fit those books to evenly split them - also I’d like the lists released in advance so you get a chance to read other books in the categories before voting - I dont mind if one year we have the very similar categories as long as that’s what people are reading but it should be based off that including older books rather than all the stuff pushed out to meet deadlines or just the next in a series from a popular author
Like many people here, I use it to find more books to read. I’m okay with them adding Romantasy but it’s strange that they removed Graphic Novels. I don’t really read graphic novels but they seemed to be really popular this past year.
This year I’d only read 23 across all categories, which is way less than normal. I’ll probably try some other ones from the longlists in the new year.
I’m SO GLAD they finally split romantasy out of fantasy. I like both, but they’ve diverged enough that they have totally different fanbases and I really think it makes sense for them to be separate categories.
I was surprised they axed graphic novels, poetry, and children’s books, though I don’t generally read any of that so I’ve never voted. If I was in charge I would change up the nonfiction to lump together the biography/autobiography/memoirs, have a separate category for science, and then have all other nonfiction books together.
My votes:
- Fiction - Yellowface
- Historical Fiction - Lady Tan’s Circle of Women
- Mystery - The Last Devil to Die
- Romantasy - A Soul of Ash and Blood
- Fantasy - The Will of the Many
- Science Fiction - Starter Villain
- Horror - How to Sell a Haunted House
- YA Fantasy - These Infinite Threads
- Nonfiction - Cobalt Red
They used to have a separate category for science and tech books. I don’t know why they cut it (I can understand cutting food/cookbooks, but also if the goal is to sell during the holiday season, then they should have kept that too).
I’d probably keep history and biography together, but split memoir/autobiography into celebrity and non-celebrity simply because celebrity ones are popular based on the person, not the actual book. And I’d cut humor --if it is a memoir put it in memoirs, and the rest can go in general nonfiction.
Do they just base it off sales from amazon or what’s trending on tiktok at this point?
You can read the rules. It is about number of shelvings (ratings, reviews and people listing as want to read) at cut-off day tied with minimum rating (Which is really low 3.5…)
Whatever skeleton crew Amazon has left running Goodreads made a huge error. Both in the categories they chose to cut and the timing of the announcement. I was watching a livestream on youtube by bookslikewoah and Jess Evans which had a number of other booktubers and lots of Goodreads target demographic. We all came in pissed at the cuts and it poisoned any good will we still had left towards the awards.
As someone said they could have cut Humour and it would have been fine because most of those books could easily be absorbed into the memoir and autobiography category. The fact that Graphic novels were cut and none of them redistributed into categories like Sci-fi or fantasy was noticed. But MG well, the anger was palpable.
My feeling is that this was a spineless attempt to avoid culture wars in the USA. As the latest Heartstopper book was sure to win Graphic Novel and MG just seems to be the latest battleground for the loud and the stupid. Rather than fight for children’s right to diverse books, they chose to cancel the category, like the useless quivering quislings they are.
I watched that live too. I do think it’s very odd to remove middle grade… Humour could definitely be absorbed into other non-fiction categories.
I think these awards and the newspapers and social media best of year list have one purpose which is to give people picks of the books they are going to buy as Christmas presents. People like giving recently released books, that is its purpose. And it’s fine that it is a popularity contest. For fans and frequent readers, the 20 book longlist by genre is really quite cool, and interesting and might give us idea. It is to sell books - which is fine, because books sold, by bookstores and publishers, this time of the year, nth copy of something might put bookstores or publishers more firmly in the black and help finance the whole industry.
It is not about quality, or what books are, will be important - I find it fascinating to look back at past years and see what turned out to be important, and not.
About best fiction award, the big one, I guess it is a battle of the Anns? Napolitano versus Patchett? Or Kuang or anybody else with a chance?
I read many of the nominated fiction and I thought Hello Beautiful was the best in the list. In the middle of ‘The Wishing Game’ though. I’m going to wait until I finish that to vote.
Thanks for the feedback.
I only ever have a few of those books nominated read so it’s honestly impossible to be unbiased. They should hold the awards a year in advance to give a chance to read them, like pick the best of 2022 this year. I don’t exclusively read new releases so i can only pick books I’ve read. It’s silly. Then again, that’s just me, maybe others are better at just reading new releases.
I haven’t read at all this year so i won’t be voting. I haven’t agreed with many of the winners in years though so, eh.
They should rename it to the TikTok awards. Books are awarded for going viral in certain circles over actual merit.
honestly more disappointed at how USA-centered this year’s nominations are. even more than usual
I’m happy they gave Romantacy it’s own category because Sarah J Maas and the like were dominating Fantasy year after year when they were more like Romance in a Fantasy setting.
I see always the same names. It’s a new release and popularity contest, not a quality filter.
I look at it as a great way to find books to read!
But “romantasy”? Really? Ick!
It’s the same as every year: my most-read categories are disappointing but from the other categories I’ve added 20+ books to my TBR. A lot of them might end up being DNFs but I like being introduced to ‘popular’ books outside of my comfort zone that I’ve never even heard of before.
I will say, 2023 has been an incredibly mediocre year for new releases. Like I want to complain about what was nominated, but I also can’t think of many 2023 releases that were actually better.
The Goodreads Choice Awards are the Teen Choice Awards for books. It’s a fun thing for people to take part of and vote in, but I wouldn’t take them as reflective of quality in any way. There are a boat load of proper book awards out there that are well regarded if you want to try and find good books.