Hello, happy Friday!
I am resting and recovering from surgery this week, so I’m looking forward to having the time to actually read everyone’s LTB posts on time for once!
Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly bookish discussion meme created by Rukky @Eternity Books and co-hosted by Aria @Book Nook Bits and Dini @DiniPandaReads. Each Friday, bloggers will write posts about a particular topic and share on their blog.
The 2025 Goodreads Choice Award winners were announced on December 4th! Do you vote for or keep up with the awards?
I left the Goodreads platform for good this year because I refuse to support anything to do with Amazon. However, before that, when I was a user of the site, I still didn’t keep up with the awards. To me, they’ve never really felt genuine, and I’ve always seen them as a popularity contest, especially because you can vote for any book in any category without having read it. The most popular books that ended up in the TickTok algorithm tend to be the ones that come out on top, and that is never going to be a way that I choose what to buy and read.
The other thing I have an issue with is that some of the nominated books are on the lists before they’re even published. This adds to the whole weird situation of people voting for books they haven’t read, or completely ignoring said books that might actually be amazing, purely because they can’t buy and read them in the short time left.
Those points aside, my absolute most significant issue, and the reason I don’t keep up with them anymore, is the lack of diversity in the awards. This is an issue both with LGBTQIA+ rep (don’t get me started on JKR’s inclusion this year) and also with the lack of BIPOC representation. This article, or this video, both go into this in detail, so I won’t continue here.
Anyway, all that to say, no, I don’t keep up with the awards, and I definitely don’t vote in them, but for the purpose of this blog post, I have had a perusal of this year’s lists.
Have you read any of this year’s winners or nominees?
I’ve read quite a few of the books on this year’s lists, predominantly from the speculative fiction categories.
- A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna
- The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer
- Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yamabo
- Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab
- The River Has Roots by Amal El Mohtar
- Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
- The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The categories have also changed in recent years, creating some controversy: the Romantasy category was added in 2024, and the Children’s and Middle Grade category was removed. What do you think about these changes? What categories would you like to see go away or come back? Are there any other changes to the awards that you’d like to see?
So I actually didn’t know about these changes, but I do think there are definitely issues here. Romantasy, I don’t have a problem with. Sure, it’s not actually a whole separate genre from fantasy, but it’s big enough right now that it does tend to stand on its own, so I can see why they have done that. I actually like that change, because it allows other fantasy books a chance when they would otherwise have likely lost to books that now sit in the romantasy category.
I hate that they have taken away the children’s and middle-grade categories, though. Children’s literature has never been more important, and there is a worrying decline in literacy rates. By taking away something that gives these books visibility, it is one more obstacle to getting children to read.
As for future changes? Bringing back the children’s and middle-grade categories would be the first thing. I’d also like to see the non-fiction category expanded. I’m not sure how much, but there is just as much diversity in non-fiction as there is in fiction.
The most significant change of course should be the addressing of the lack of overall diversity in the awards, but I think that is one we will be hoping for indefinitely at this point.
Pages of Emma 
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