Voting has begun in the first round of the Goodreads Choice Awards: The Best Books 2023 and will continue through November 26.
The 2023 Goodreads Choice Awards have two rounds of voting open to all registered Goodreads members. Winners will be announced December 7, 2023.
This year a new Romantasy category has been added, and they have dropped the Children’s & Middle Grade, Poetry, and Graphic Novels categories, leaving in a total of 15 categories.
In the first round 20 books chosen by Goodreads are up for vote in each of the 15 categories, and members can vote for one book in each category.
In the final round, which runs November 28-December 3, the field narrows to the top 10 books in each category, and members will vote for the winners.
In addition to the categories listed below, there also are some genre works in the Best Debut Novel and Best Nonfiction categories.
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I’m glad they added Romantasy as a category — this will avoid the usual fights we used to get when a romantic fantasy ended up winning the Fantasy category. I just wish someone had thought of a better name for the subgenre. And what will happen when science fiction fantasy becomes really popular? Scientiromance? Romasifiction? Romscifi? Will we have to return to Gernsback’s Scientifiction? 😉
I wish they would not have deleted several major categories. They can surely add new categories without chopping out items. (Does Amazon have such tight reins on the Goodreads budget?)
Wasn’t “scientific romance” a term applied to some stories a century ago? Though I realize that you are looking for a nice squashed together neologism.
@Mike
“Scientific romance” works more than the ones I came up with. Or maybe “planetary romance”? (“Sword and planet” would work for some.)
Why did they drop three categories? Last year, the Graphic Novels category had more voters than many of the categories they left in — including Science Fiction, Horror, Humor, Nonfiction, and History & Biography.
For that matter, I’m still miffed that they dropped the “write in your own choice” option last year. Why? Now if a book’s not one of their initial selections, it can’t win, even if it’s wildly popular.
And I don’t know how they make their selections, but their reading list is clearly different from mine this year. Last year, I was able to comfortably vote in 9 categories and had read 8 of the options in fantasy alone. This year, I was (barely) able to vote in 3 categories, and hadn’t read more than 2 of their selections in any of them. And that’s not necessarily all on them, but my reading rate hasn’t dropped noticeably this year.
The Goodreads Awards baffle me.
I’ve only read one or two books in most of the categories (none in several), so wouldn’t feel comfortable voting in this. (My reading rate has gone to crap the last few years. Only twenty books so far this year.)
A lot of the book cover designs, especially in the “Romantasy” category, seem pretty cookie-cutter. Feels like they’re all part of the same multi-volume series.
Scratching my head here, too, at the elimination of several categories, especially “Graphic Novels”.
Disappearance of the Graphic Novels category seems especially strange in the year when Amazon killed off Comixology.
[roll out a cork board with red string]
At least this year there are some books that I’ve read. Such is the price of frequently diving into the books of yesteryear. And by “yesteryear” I just mean 2022 and older.
The Book That Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence (fantasy) and The Ferryman by Justin Cronin (sci-fi) were excellent reading experiences worthy of recognition.
I find it more than a little odd that System Collapse by Martha Wells is on this list. It just came out 2 days ago and therefore shouldn’t have received enough popular attention to justify inclusion. I pre-ordered and it is waiting for me right now. I’m looking forward to reading it. But including it on the GR list looks a bit like insider influence.
I agree about the graphic novels category.
Regards,
Dann
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I’ve only read one book in each of those categories, except for Romantasy where I’ve read none. And so far this year I’ve read 131 books according to my Storygraph stats. Not that I’ll be participating in the awards regardless, as I don’t use Goodreads save to sometimes look up series order or book summaries.
As far as what was chosen, I saw a post on Reddit that claims the dominant factor is how many people have shelved the book on Goodreads, including the “To Read” shelf, which would explain how a newer book could end up on the list if it’s widely anticipated and a lot of people shelved it “to read”, perhaps?