Well, no real surprises in this years Goodreads Awards… annoyingly in some respects.
As I hinted at in my blog post a few weeks back – when I discussed the announcement of the finalists – the Award tends to be more of an author popularity contest than a ‘good book contest’. Just to explain what I mean, the winner The Ocean At The End Of The Lane got a rating of 4.01 with 45,000 votes, but A Memory Of Light in second place had a rating of 4.51 and yet only 13,021 votes. In fact, of the 20 books that made the finals 13 scored a higher average than the winner.
Sadly, I guess this is an inevitability when you have a poll based competition as opposed to a panel based judgement. One of the best insights I’ve read on this matter was by Joe Abercrombie (who, when you think about it, should be as in-favour as anyone of popularity contests!):
“Individual juries will always have their wrinkles, and I’m sure there will always be issues that can be taken with any result, but at least they’ve all read the books on the shortlist, considered them, compared them, argued over them, and made an informed group decision as to which one is the best, however they choose to define it.”
AND
“[With public vote awards] there is no discussion or examination, necessarily. It seems deeply unlikely most voters will have read much of th] e extended longlist, or even the whole shortlist. It seems perfectly possible many voters will only have read the book they vote for. There’s the risk it becomes a campaigning contest in which even committed readers of epic fantasy, let alone more general readers, aren’t particularly interested.”
At the end of the day though I shouldn’t be too critical of Goodreads and their process, because this year the books that placed highly in the awards were pretty damned good… It just seems a shame that without even looking at the books you can guess who will take the title and the rough order that the runner ups will place just by viewing the names of the authors.
I will post the covers of the books with links to their Goodreads page below. They are in order (left to right of who got the most votes). You can see full details on Goodreads by clicking here.
P.S. Please do let me know whether you think Goodreads Visitors got it right 🙂
