#goodreads choice

[doubledaybooks]

Goodreads Choice Awards: Vote in the Opening Round of 2024!

Vote in the opening round of the 2024 Goodreads Choice Awards! We're thrilled and honored by readers who nominated our authors this year:

Fiction: SAME AS IT EVER WAS by Claire Lombardo

Audiobook & Historical Fiction: JAMES by Percival Everet

Historical Fiction: THE FROZEN RIVER by Ariel Lawhon

Romance: LIES & WEDDINGS by Kevin Kwan

Debut Novel: VICTIM by Andrew Boryga

Nonfiction: FRAMED by John Grisham

History & Biography: THE WIDE WIDE SEA by Hampton Sides

History & Biography: WHEN WOMEN RAN FIFTH AVENUE by Julie Satow

[rosiesfables]

Delilah and Claire on a date night downtown 🌈💄

✨Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake ✨

[drchucktingle]

vote BURY YOUR GAYS in final round of goodreads awards, a book that addresses this moment and moments like it by avenging them through what is essentially meta fan art by way of horror satire. a real world chance to pick up a ball that many have dropped.

i know i get a little RILED UP over timelines but i cant ignore the way this moment could potentially create something so potent. a history of dead queer characters leading to a book that directly stands in opposition to the trope finding success and elevated through FAN votes

like a rallying cry for every slain queer character. all of the fan fiction creations and erotic ships crawling from their graves and staggering into the bright lights of mainstream consciousness. BURY YOUR GAYS they groan. the cemetery was FULL. so many votes it cant be stopped

fun to think on potential realities, and especially fun when theyre just a FEW STEPS AWAY. if you want to trot that path with me then take a moment to vote bud, its very easy. if you voted last round you can do it again now.  lets shake things up buckaroos

VOTE HERE:

[lexreadsdiversely]

Screw Goodreads: Poetry Recommendations

Since goodreads doesn't think poetry matters, here's a random rec list for anyone who wants to read more poetry. You may find many of these titles on Libby and the Queer Liberation Library @queerliblib

Poetry collections I can personally recommend:

bone - Yrsa Daley-Ward

Wound from the Mouth of a Wound - torrin a. greathouse

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities - Chen Chen

Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics - Edited by T.C. Tolbert and Trace Peterson

Postcolonial Love Poem - Natalie Diaz

Thrown in the Throat - Benjamin Garcia

The Hurting Kind - Ada Limón

Night Sky with Exit Wounds - Ocean Vuong

And here are some of the many poetry collections on my tbr (libby, my beloved, please... I'm not above begging) but I figured I'd add them for folks to do their own exploring.

Eating the Archive - Yousif M. Qazmiyeh

If My Body Could Speak - Blythe Baird

Helium - Rudy Francisco

There Should Be Flowers - Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

Corazón - Yesika Salgado

The Orange and Other Poems - Wendy Cope

The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde - Audre Lorde

I am Schizophrenic: Poetry from a Beautiful Brain - Kerenza Ryan

Blood Orange - Yaffa As

MARIPOSAS: A Modern Anthology of Queer Latino Poetry - Edited by Emanuel Xavier

Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul - Ryka Aoki

Under Her Skin: A Women in Horror Poetry Showcase, Vol 1 - Edited by Lindy Ryan and Toni Miller

Life on Mars - Tracy K. Smith

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On - Franny Choi

Call Us What We Carry - Amanda Gorman

We Will Be Shelter: Poems for Survival - Edited by Andrea Gibson

Crush - Richard Siken

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head - Warsan Shire

The Tradition - Jericho Brown

The End of the Alphabet - Claudia Rankine

Beautiful Zero: Poems - Jennifer Willoughby

Calling a Wolf a Wolf - Kaveh Akbar

Individual poems:

Check out my poetry blog @thispoemisaboutyou

Poem-a-Day (also a podcast)

Appreciating Poetry:

If Poetry Confuses You, Watch This - Introduction to Poetry Appreciation

Disclaimer: I do not personally know if any of these authors are scumbags. I'll be doing research on each one soon (but a lot that goes on happens on twitter, and I don't touch twitter so I might miss shit). I encourage you to do your own research as well, and feel free to message me if you know something I don't.

**And as always, make sure you read the blurbs and check content warnings if you need to. Storygraph is great for content warnings if the author doesn't have them on their website**

okay stopping cuz this post is getting too long, but I'll make a part two at some point

[rosesutherlandwrites]

What is HAPPENING this week Y'all. Y'ALL. A Sweet Sting Of Salt is nominated for a Goodreads Readers Choice Award! (in the fantasy category, which will never fail to crack me up a bit given how very historical fiction with a single fantasy element it is, but I love it)

I am already floored, regardless of the outcome. YOU did this, every one of you who's read, reviewed, shared on my silly promos, and generally helped me maintain my sanity from the very beginning of this little book's journey, and I could not be more grateful to you all. 💕��💕

If you use GR and would like to cast a vote for Salty, Jean, Muirin and I will all be very appreciative ❤️

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[no-where-new-hero]

omg I need your thoughts on the terminally o line author culture bc ngl it makes my eye TWITCH, there are authors I deliberately avoid even tho I've heard their stuff is good bc they're like that 🙈

HHHHH oh good lord, okay, from how I see it, there are two angles on this, both aggravating and sad: the official decree one and the spontaneous ecosystem one.

The officious one is that the nature of publishing nowadays demands an author have an online presence. You need Twitter/X. You need to let every potential reader know your book is coming out. You need engagement through reviews and pre-orders incentives (if you buy now you’ll get a special keychain!!) and word of mouth assurances from your peers that yes your book is as cool as you say it is. You need a newsletter with links (more buying! more voting on lists that are simply popularity contests!) and promises you’re still working on the next thing, don’t forget about me in the morass of everyone else doing the same thing. You need an Instagram and TikTok now to post pretty pictures and videos because one or two authors made it big off this kind of promotion and now everyone thinks it’s the ticket to the bestseller list (sadly, it seems to be working). You need an OnlyFans (a joke but I do recall a twt spat that was a joke/not joke about how rupi kaur will always be more beautiful than her critics and people who took issue with the conflation of beauty with talent). At the end of all this, you’re basically an influencer, a content creator creating content for the content you should be focusing on creating, the finished novel. And the novel itself seems to be disappearing behind the masks used to promote it (fanfic-style tropes, moodboards, playlists, memes) until I now no longer trust the book that I’ll pick up to have any resemblance to the enticements that brought me here. I’ve seen an author or two complain about the stress all this self-promotion generates, but it’s become such an entrenched part of the industry, I think people just accept it. And thus spend too much time online hoping that if they tweet just a little more, produce just one more reel, maybe that’ll be the difference between a sale and no sale.

The other side of this, distinct but obviously connected, is the ecosystem created by this panic of being perpetually visible coupled with the fact that so many of the new authors came of age during the rise of internet fandom culture. That opinionated community mindset that blurs the line between anonymity and friendship is the lens they bring to their own work. I mean, it makes sense I suppose—if you love yelling about characters and words, why wouldn’t you do that once you start to produce your own? This really came home to me hearing about that reviewbombgate “scandal” and how people involved were in reylo circles and that was used to provide receipts. You’re interacting with your readers and peers about your intimate work but they are also all strangers. They will not always give you the benefit of the doubt, and now—as opposed to the past when maybe the worst that could happen was a handful of bad reviews in newspapers—you will either be tagged in hate reviews, sub-tweeted, explicitly called out, demanded to atone for your sins. It’s no longer the morality of consumption but the morality of production. Of course, the easy answer is just log-off, touch some grass. But that can work only when you and everyone else are separated by anonymous accounts or when you have no platform to maintain. As an author trying to make your livelihood from this, suddenly it’s do or die. We’re in a strange moment of authorship bringing the Internet’s echo-chamber and claustrophobic into the real world (this is a lie: publishing now is no longer the real world. But it looks like it) and thus you can kind of no longer escape things.

Will the average reader who isn’t aware of all these machinations care about reviewbombgate? Would a reader browsing at Target think about the controversies around Lightlark? Very likely not. But the impression I’m getting more and more is that the average reader isn’t the one buying all the books. Or shall we say—a bestseller’s status relies on bookstore stock. Bookstore stock is only huge when they know a book will be a good investment. They’ll only know a book is a good investment if it and its author has street cred based on booktokkers, bookstagram, bloggers and reviewers (have you noticed how many books out these last maybe 1-3 years have these kinds of accounts thanked in the acknowledgments? Yeah), and THESE are also chronically online people who will Know. And decide the cast of fate.

Honestly, @batrachised, I see why you avoid these kinds of writers, though I wonder how long it’ll be before the disease becomes epidemic.

[jhezenkoss]

the peril of reading old scifi/fantasy is i’m left trying to navigate author websites that were clearly hand coded in html 20 years ago and haven’t been updated since when i just want a nice neat list of all their books that they somehow don’t seem to have 😭

[princessofbookaholics]

the goodreads choice awards manages to piss me off every year

[books-and-cookies]

every year when the goodreads choice awards roll around, i realise how completely out of touch i am with new releases

i could only vote in 2 or 3 categories this year, which were horror, debut and historical nonfiction, because i haven't read almost any of the books in the other categories

i used to have so much fomo over not reading new releases, or not getting any new releases, and nowadays, i just can't be bothered, nor do i really care about not reading everything as it comes out (or ever, for that matter)

[fictionadventurer]

There is not a single homely thing that, looked at from a certain angle, does not become fairy. Think of the Dapple, or the Dawl, when they roll the sunset towards the east. Think of an autumn wood, or a hawthorn in May. A hawthorn in May — there’s a miracle for you! Who would ever have dreamed that that gnarled stumpy old tree had the power to do that? Well, all these things are familiar sights, but what should we think if never having seen them we read a description of them, or saw them for the first time? A golden river! Flaming trees! Trees that suddenly break into flower! For all we know, it may be Dorimare that is Fairyland to the people across the Debatable Hill

-Lud-in-the-Mist, Hope Mirrlees

[jinxy-valentine]

@ Goodreads Choice Awards: Why is there a romantasy category but no category for graphic novels?? Or kids books?? Or poetry??

[nerdby]

I loathe the Goodreads challenge. It literally only exists to trick people into buying more books from Amazon -- the company that owns Goodreads FYI. It's framed as a competition -- a challenge -- to make it seem fun. So that people can brag and feel a false sense of superiority cause they read 212 picture books to Lil Timmy. And this helps to ensure a class divide between jackasses who make unfunny jokes about putting themselves in debt to be able to afford books and people who are too poor to be able to buy books and must rely on the library instead.

Life is not a competition and reading shouldn't be either.

[drchucktingle]

truly honored to learn that BURY YOUR GAYS has made it to final round of GOODREADS CHOICE AWARDS. even if you voted before you can now vote again LETS TROT BUCKAROOS WERE TAKIN THIS TO THE TOP (SOUND OF BUCKAROO BATTLE HORNS) LOVE IS REAL

[quillandqueer]

Goodreads Choice Awards 2024 - my votes

[lotrmusical]

Like the rainbow after the rain joy will reveal itself after sorrow

'send me lines of poetry' ask game was a HORRIBLE MISTAKE because sometimes your EVIL FRIENDS will use it as an excuse to TORMENT YOU. watching these asks arrive one by one and trying to figure out how i was going to reply sincerely took literal years off my life. this is my elijah wood wigs interview moment. thanks @ultravioletness