The opening round of the 2026 Goodreads Choice Awards has started, and it continues until November 22nd. Following that is the final round of voting, which will have a shortlist of the most popular books from round one. That opens November 24th and runs until November 29th. The winners are announced December 3rd.
There are books in 15 categories to vote for: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mystery & Thriller, Romance, Romantasy, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror, Debut Novel, Audiobook, Young Adult Fantasy & Sci-Fi, Young Adult Fiction, Nonfiction, Memoir, and History & Biography. These categories are unchanged from last year.
The Goodreads Choice Awards are the most blatant popularity contest of all the year-end awards: you don’t need to have read all the books in a category to vote for the “best” one. In fact, you don’t even need to have read the book you’re voting for. That introduces a host of problems, and that’s before getting into the fact that Amazon owns Goodreads. Still, it makes for a good snapshot of the books getting the most attention at this point in time.
You can vote on the Goodreads website.
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