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.
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.