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.
Goodreads at the end of the day is a social media platform not a judge of literature.
These awards are essentially a contest of which have been read the most, sometimes that is a great book, Babel IMO is a good book and also popular but popular does not always been good.
That being said I have no idea how the books are picked for us to vote on if anyone knows?
I’ve noticed most of them I’ve never heard of which is odd because I stay mostly up to date. I knew almost all of the 2022 nominees even if I hadn’t gotten to read them yet but 2023 I could only vote in a few categories despite reading almost double the books I read last year
Goodreads doesn’t really share its algorithm, but it is based on how many times the book is shelved (read/to be read) and it has to have at least a 3.5 star (I believe) average rating. So it is basically how many people are interested in reading this book (and therefore a popularity context) and of those books, which do people like the most.
(No one ever mentions that if you list a book for a Goodreads giveaway, anyone who enters the giveaway automatically gets the book added to their to be read shelf. So ‘interested’ has caveats).