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.
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.