The GoodReads Choice Awards for 2024 were published three days ago and this is, then, the right time to take a look and see what they say about the platform and its readers. The most obvious implicit statement is that this is a heavily biased platform, with a very high presence of US readers and authors, which does not represent at all the state of reading worldwide. This might seem evident, but often evident matters need to be raised. The platform boasts that 6,261,936 votes have been cast but it does not clarify whether this is the number of persons who have voted or the number of votes considering all the different categories (I think it\u2019s the latter). There is not, as far as I know, another platform that awards similar prizes with so many voters, which is why this is today my object of interest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first conundrum has to do with the list of categories, which fluctuates from year to year. The 22 categories of the first year, 2011, are many more than the 15 categories of 2024. These are: fiction, historical fiction, mystery & thriller, romance, romantasy, fantasy, science fiction, horror, debut novel, audiobook, young adult fantasy, young adult fiction, nonfiction, memoir, history & biography. A quite surprising matter is that although at least 11 categories are fiction and 3 non-fiction (the category \u2018audiobook\u2019 is mixed), GoodReads only calls one \u2018fiction\u2019 and another \u2018non-fiction\u2019. What they mean by \u2018fiction\u2019 is actually \u2018literary fiction\u2019, but, of course, this is an overflowing category. James<\/em> by Percival Everett, the new National Book Award winner, is classified as \u2018historical fiction\u2019. The total winner, with 253,147 votes, far more than any other book is The Women<\/em> by twice GCA winner Kristin Hannah. Set in 1965, this is classified as historical fiction (it\u2019s the winner in that category). The author, a worldwide best-selling novelist has not received any literary awards; see her bio here. James<\/em>, by the way, came up second to The Women in the historical fiction category.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I expected Sally Rooney\u2019s new novel, Intermezzo<\/em>, to win the \u2018fiction\u2019 category but the award went to Alison Espach\u2019s The Wedding People<\/em> (Rooney was second). The shortlist for \u2018fiction\u2019 is a mixed bag of popular authors (Liane Moriarty, Dolly Alderton) and literary award winners (Rooney herself, Tommy Orange, Elizabeth Strout, Richard Powers, Louise Erdrich). I have not read Espach but the summary of her novel (girl crashes by accident a posh wedding) sounds a bit chick-lit to me (maybe the cover is confusing). That she got more than 94000 votes and Louise Erdrich only 4000 might have to do with their respective books, but also with GoodReads\u2019 democratization of taste. Juries composed by a handful of people awarding Bookers and Pulitzers cannot compete with the crowd at GoodReads, though my guess is that while Espach will be happy enough to get her third GCA, Erdrich (a Pulitzer and Book Award winner) won\u2019t care very much to miss her first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I leave to others to count the names one by one, but at first sight my impression is that 80-85% of the nominees and winners are women. Whoever writes today that women are discriminated in any way in the world of writing is plain wrong. In fact, my impression is that men are jumping ship as writing and reading comes to be identified with women. This is not really good news. For me, ideally, everyone should read everyone and the market should offer books written from all sensibilities and any identity. If the number of male writers diminishes fewer men will read (for men, let\u2019s acknowledge this, are less open to reading women than women are to reading men), and this is a loss for everyone. And a gain for videogames.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t know why the category \u2018mystery & thriller\u2019 (winner Liz Moore\u2019s The God of the Woods<\/em>) is not called \u2018detective fiction\u2019 or does not include that label. Many of the novels in this list are cosy mysteries in which someone has been murdered but death is not taken too seriously. How to Solve Your Own Murder<\/em> by Kristen Perrin seems to encapsulate what I mean (it\u2019s, attention!, A Jimmy Fallon\u2019s Book Club Finalist for 2024, sorry for the snide\u2026). \u201cRomance queen Emily Henry,\u201d GoodReads announces, \u201ctakes home her fourth consecutive GCA with Funny Story.\u201d Well, never heard of her (nor did my students), but, as happens, I\u2019m not a romance reader. I don\u2019t know why romantasy, the child of romance and fantasy, has a separate category (winner House of Flame and Shadow<\/em> by Sarah J. Maas), but it gets 499,305 votes total. If, however, I consider that \u2018fiction\u2019 gets 546,063 votes only that might explain the rise of the category. Maas herself, though, is no novice with eighth Goodreads Choice Awards in the YA and Fantasy categories. And, no, her novel is not shortlisted in the fantasy category, so readers are indeed seeing this and romantasy as separate genres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the science fiction category the winner by twice as many votes as the second favourite novel is The Ministry of Time<\/em> by Kaliane Bradley. Any Spaniard can tell you this is blatant plagiarism from popular series El Ministerio del Tiempo<\/em>, though, of course, the author denies it. Caring nothing for the Booker Prize, readers have left Samantha Harvey\u2019s Orbital <\/em>(the new winner) in the fourth position. Booker Prize Nominee for Longlist (2023) and Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best science fiction novel of the year (2024), In Ascension<\/em> by Martin McInnes only gets 2495 votes, which shows that GoodReads voters do not like their SF to be so literary. I would agree. Things in horror don\u2019t look too well, as the winner is Stephen King\u2026 with a collection of stories, You Like It Darker<\/em>. I\u2019m really quite sceptical that a short story collection can be the best-liked horror book of 2024, but that might be simply because the genre is not going through its best moment. King himself is not at his best. Some of the 12 stories in his collection are not even new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m skipping the categories debut novel and audiobooks, which are just too miscellaneous to focus next on young adult novels, once again split into \u2018YA fantasy\u2019 and \u2018YA fiction\u2019, as if fantasy novels were not fiction. The winner is Ruthless Vows<\/em> by Rebecca Ross, which shames Brandon Sanderson\u2019s Defiant<\/em> into a humble fourth position. There are 426,420 votes in \u2018YA fantasy\u2019 in contrast to 392,309 for \u2018YA fiction\u2019; I assume that most (or all) who voted for \u2018fiction\u2019 voted for \u2018fantasy\u2019. The winner for \u2018fiction\u2019 is the fifth volume of the series Heartstopper<\/em> by Alice Oseman, a major phenomenon that has broken many barriers for YA LGTBIAQ+ fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, the three categories left are non-fiction, memoir and history & biography. Again, I don\u2019t know what\u2019s happened to autobiography, which seems to have been fused together with memoir. There has been along the years other non-fiction categories such as travel writing, food & cooking, humour\u2026 and I think I can guess what has happened. GoodReads is now (my guess) the meeting point of younger and younger readers, far less interested in the non-fiction categories and keener on the YA categories growing so fast. I would insist that romantasy gets roughly half a million votes, and memoir (the more popular non-fiction category) a little below 300,000. That\u2019s an important difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The non-fiction winner is a no-brainer: The Anxious Generation<\/em> by Jonathan Haidt, subtitled How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness<\/em>. It\u2019s a sharp, very necessary book aimed at redressing the situation. The winning memoir is The Third Gilmore Girl<\/em> by actor Kelly Bishop that with 80000 votes seems a very clear winner. Confirming the impression that GoodReads is extremely biased towards US authors, the winner for history & biography is Evan Friss\u2019s The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore<\/em>, a title that is almost humorous in its use of synonyms to stress the Americanness of its subject. Yuval Noah Harari\u2019s Nexus<\/em> is only seventh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t have clear conclusions but I would certainly love to have more information about the voting process. I do not know if voters choose in full knowledge of what their doing or randomly in view of the long lists in each categories. Do readers vote only for what they have read? Do they vote for favourite authors regardless of whether they have read their books? As happens every end of the year I marvel that I have missed so many interesting books even though I am a quite constant reader. Who is the typical GoodReads reader and how much do they read? Is this award, in short, an accurate snapshot of 2024 above the lists of the traditional media? Many questions, I know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n GoodReads is so Anglophonecentric that it does not even have a category for translated fiction as traditional media often have. This distinction irritates me very much because translated fiction is not a genre but a consequence of linguistic diversity. In Spain, for good or for bad, we include translations in the list of best books, perhaps because we worship anything that is foreign above our own productions. Yet, Anglophone media and social media, while apparently showing respect for translators manage to segregate all books not written in English. Thus, among the dozens of books shortlisted by GoodReads only one (if I\u2019m not wrong) is a translation: horror category nominee A Sunny Place for Shady People<\/em> by Mariana Enr\u00edquez (translated by Megan McDowell). I would call Enr\u00edquez a literary, rather than a genre, author but maybe this is a too fine distinction at this point of the post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thanks for reading!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The GoodReads Choice Awards for 2024 were published three days ago and this is, then, the right time to take a look and see what they say about the platform and its readers. The most obvious implicit statement is that this is a heavily biased platform, with a very high presence of US readers and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1137,18,799,22],"tags":[1194,1195,1142],"class_list":["post-3561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemporary-literature","category-general","category-literary-criticism","category-literary-studies","tag-1194","tag-awards","tag-goodreads"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3561"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3563,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3561\/revisions\/3563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}