Who?

The website Goodreads, of which your humble Friar is a member, has posted its opening round ballots for it's "2021 Choice Awards." Now, though I read a lot of books, I am accustomed to low familiarity with many of the nominees. I don't read books in several of the categories, and in the case of several others, well, the nominees suck and I don't want to read the books.

I am even accustomed to have never heard of several of the nominated works at all. I leave many categories blank because I am not the person to tell you whether a book on the ballot was any good or not. But this year I found one book -- just one -- in the entire slate of nominees I would like to vote for. I have skimmed singer Brandi Carlile's memoir Broken Houses and plan on picking it up, which was about as close as I could come to picking a favorite in any category.

And this year I had no idea who a good four-fifths of the authors were, let alone the books they wrote. I'm not sure how wise a move this is for Goodreads. Middle-aged grumps like me are probably more likely to be bookish people than the screen devotees of the Millennial and Zoomer generations, so it would seem smarter to find books we read in order to draw attention to the contest. But apparently I'm not as smart as those folks are, which I guess is OK. It means copies of what I want to read stay on the shelves longer and I've got more time to pick them up.