Here. We. Go! Final round of voting was live until Monday, December 2nd at Goodreads.com, which was just a few days ago (even though July also feels like a few days ago). With 20 categories at this point of the voting process, I have read 7 books in 5 categories with a whopping total of 40 books on the TBR list.

I have a couple of complaints to make. As I was going through this third round of votes, I noticed  that quite a few of the titles were from either the Amazon First Reads program or selections from Barnes & Noble’s bookclub, either the adult selection or the young adult selection. The Amazon First Reads program is where Amazon allows Prime members to download a free kindle book every month, but all the choices are from the next month’s new releases. That means the reader gets to read the book one whole month before everyone else. It’s like getting those highly coveted ARC copies straight from the publisher courtesy of Amazon. I also have noticed that a majority of the titles are highly advertised to me, a book nerd, on all of the usual advertising avenues. (Here’s looking at you, Google Analytics…) And my final complaint is that I really don’t think one book should be able to be a finalist in two different categories. Yes, I think it’s great and necessary to have the debut novelist category but then those titles should not be vying for the top spot in their respective genres.  Let’s reward MORE books, please!  

With these observations, I’m hoping Nikki and I can bring you some books that are not as highly advertised or distributed, in addition to the stacks on stacks of books from the big name publishing houses. We do ask for your help in finding lesser known and newly published books, go ahead and comment with some of your recent favorites that we might not have seen anywhere else. 

~Ashley

PS: Don’t forget to come back after the GoodReads winners are announced on December 10th when we will dissect the choices and tell you which of our picks made the final cut!