2017 Goodreads Choice Awards
Winners of the 2017 Goodreads Choice awards for the “best books of 2017” as chosen by users of the site, were announced December 5, 2017. There are several winners of genre interest:
Best Historical Fiction
- Before We Were Yours, Lisa Wingate (Ballantine) 29,431 votes
Best Science Fiction
- Artemis, Andy Weir (Crown) 33,957 votes
Best Fantasy
- Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original Screenplay, J.K. Rowling (Levine) 92,611 votes
Best Horror
- Sleeping Beauties, Stephen King & Owen King (Scribner) 50,519 votes
Best Young Adult Fantasy & Science Fiction
- A Court of Wings and Ruin, Sarah J. Maas (Bloomsbury Children’s) 71,165 votes
Best Middle Grade & Children’s
- The Ship of the Dead, Rick Riordan (Disney/Hyperion) 34,516 votes
Goodreads reported 3,887,625 total votes cast, up from 3,564,098 total votes in 2016 and 3,007,748 in 2015. For the full list of categories and nominees, see the official website.
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As always in this contest, a popularity thing that allows open voting no matter if anything has actually been read or not, the winners are way less interesting than the nominees. I have my doubts about how many of those who voted for a screenplay actually read it, or how many voters for the middle grade children’s category gave anything else but the two nominees by Rick Riordan–one of my faves–a single glance.
Of course this sort of tunnel vision shows up in a lot of award programs, while many of the curated ones lean heavily to political correctness and academic viewpoints instead of focusing on books that average readers enjoy