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.
Same as every year. It will be a contest based on “I have read this book” instead of “this is the best of these books”. Everyone will vote for the one book they read in each category and any under-the-radar books will fall by the wayside.
My policy is that if I’ve only read one book in a category, I don’t vote in that category unless I thought the book was just amazing. Ideally I like to have at least four in a category.
You have to be such a specific type of reader to achieve this though (prolific and reading almost exclusively new releases). I read over 100 books a year but a ton of that is backlist so I am lucky to have read six or seven titles across all categories.
Prolific, yes, exclusively new releases, no, if you’re prolific enough. I read 23 on the list so far, out of 346 total books so far, and I do still plan to read two more before the voting ends (Bookshops and Bonedust, and System Collapse, both on hold at the library).
You could also be medium-prolific and get a lot of hits if you mostly read specific genres.
Which means they’re essentially a popularity contest, that I don’t find particularly useful.
This could be solved if they made the opening round shorter and the final round longer though I think.
In my favourite category I’ve read 7 of the nominees, 5 in the debut category, and I don’t even read that much (23 books this year). I think that’s a fair amount to vote and simply shorten the list.
I’m sure I could probably make a go of reading most finalists if I had the full two weeks. But it’s just a couple days after that which is not really fair. I don’t vote but I’m sure some do.
Also, some of the best books I read this year aren’t even on there
My thoughts when scrolling through.
I feel we should skip 2023 winners and spend 2024 reading the nominees and announce 2023 winners and 2024 nominees at the same time, end of next year. Or even announce nominations and keep voting open for 6 months or something.
I’d rather be behind so we actually have time to read them.
What you don’t consider is that this is Goodreads being paid to SELL to you. Nobody actually really cares what we think. Big publishers pay, websites advertise. Same with the articles Goodreads has that’s all just “books we were paid to sell to you right now”. Sure, sometimes they cover it in whatever feel good cause (disabilities visibility month or Native American heritage week or whatever) and maaaaybe they sprinkle in some author we are supposed to think of as an underdog.
But it’s really just an ad.
That makes a lot of sense. I feel like I can see that especially with what’s trending book wise right now. Makes me sad that a lot of arguably better books are left out just because of sales.
That was the impression I got. I only read 2 books that are nominated, but both are the only one I read in their category, so I decided not to vote for them because I’d be comparing them to nothing. But I think this will be very common. Few people will have read 2+ books from any given category.
The craziest thing is that System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries #7) by Martha Wells is nominated for best Science Fiction, and it was literally published 3 days ago - on the 13th November. Come on! I haven’t even received my preordered copy yet.
Most people who vote for that aren’t likely to have had time to read it even, it’s what - 11 days left to vote in the first round? Yet I wouldn’t be surprised if it won, just by of how popular the series is and the author is…
No one will have time to even read through a couple of the books they haven’t read for even one single category, so the whole thing just seems pointless.
I thought it came out yesterday (book releases on Tuesdays).
Agreed. I do think there’s value in the nominations. I love finding books that way, and I love watching YouTubers read all the books in a certain category. But the actual voting/results? Meaningless.
There were also books in the poll that came out yesterday, people haven’t had time to read them yet.
There were a few categories I’d read multiple books in, but even then it’s like max of 4.