Your Book Friend

Happy Thursday, book friends! The Goodreads Choice Awards winners have been announced. I always enjoy looking at the winners for the genres I read to see how many of them I’ve read. Even though the awards are really more of a popularity contest than anything, that’s sort of why I find them so interesting. I like to see what people were hearing about and reading the most in any given year, even if I don’t think that always equates to the “best” books of the year.

Let’s take a stroll through the winners from genres that are commonly covered here on Your Book Friend.

Fiction

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow took this category, which I found 0% surprising. It’s actually the only nominee from this category that I’ve read (though a few others are on my TBR), which is one of the reasons I always feel a bit silly voting for the Goodreads Choice Awards.

Romance

Emily Henry’s Book Lovers snagged the win in this spot, which is also not that surprising. I’ve read a good handful of the nominees for this category, and I definitely think Book Lovers is up there. It isn’t my favorite of hers, but it still delivers on the bookish love story front.

Memoir & Autobiography

I’m Glad My Mom Died took the top spot here, and I am so pleased to see it. This book surprised the heck out of me and it’s truly such a well-written and raw memoir.

Debut Novel

My favorite book of the year, Lessons in Chemistry, snagged the win and it is so very deserved in my opinion. This book has such a unique humor and storytelling mode to it. I’ll be thinking about this reading experience for a while.

Nonfiction

This is the only commonly-read category this year where I haven’t read the winner, which is kind of impressive if I’m being honest. I usually have a much lower hit rate for what’s popular. Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart took the win here, which makes sense, because people do adore Brené Brown.

Since these are the only genres I reliably read this year, my commentary on the rest won’t be that interesting. I’m pretty happy that many of my favorities wound up winners, even if I’m not that surprised to see them there. If you want to know who won the other categories this year, the full list of winners is available here.

Happy Wednesday, book friends! This week’s post will be short and sweet because we’ve got a guest post up on our Medium site! It’s been a while since I’ve had anyone new ask to write for our What We’re Reading Wednesday column, so it’s pretty exciting to meet a new book lover with a weekly reading update to share.

You can check out Kayla’s guest post on our Medium publication, here.

As for me, I’m well into Kiss Her Once for Me and am really enjoying it over all (though, one thing is really bugging me that I’ll be sure to bring up in my review). I was super excited to see that there’s an Australian Cattle Dog in the story, and even more excited to learn that he is called Paul Hollywood. My pup, Azula, is an Australian Cattle Dog/Australian Shepherd mix, so I’m enjoying seeing how Cochrun captures the spunky energy of the breed. There’s almost certainly an ACD in her life.

Okay, that’s enough out of me for today! Please do support our guest writer over on Medium this week!