Best of Book Riot

Goodreads Choice Awards So White

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S. Zainab Williams

Executive Director, Content

S. Zainab would like to think she bleeds ink but the very idea makes her feel faint. She writes fantasy and horror, and is currently clutching a manuscript while groping in the dark. Find her on Twitter: @szainabwilliams.

Welcome to The Best of Book Riot, our daily round-up of what’s on offer across our site, newsletters, podcasts, and social channels. Not everything is for everyone, but there is something for everyone.

The Unbearable Whiteness of the Goodreads Choice Awards

Goodreads’s largest traffic source and use comes from the United States. A whopping 48% of users are in the US, with the United Kingdom (7%), Canada (6%), Australia (4%), and India (3%) rounding out the top six. Goodreads has more female-identifying users than male, at about 60% to 40%. Demographically, the site’s users swing younger, with those between 25 and 34 accounting for about 30% of total users. This is followed by those between 18 and 24 at 21% and those between 35 and 44 at 18%*. If you’ve got a book that’s going to reach a young female readership, Goodreads is an excellent place to be.

But Goodreads has a problem. The platform is dominated by white users and as a result, the Goodreads Choice Awards reflect back a whiteness that is not only unrepresentative of the year in publishing but that fails to acknowledge a decade’s worth of work on increasing the visibility of diversity throughout the book world.

What If You Don’t Need to Read More in 2025?

Don’t get me wrong; I am extremely pro- all of these things. My personal routines include exercise, meditation, and a daily gratitude practice, and one of my intentions for the new year is to avoid fast fashion. I like a goal as much as the next girl, and I’m not here to judge. What I want to interrogate is not whether these things—the exercise and meditation and reading and eating less red meat—are good, but the idea that we should do more of them each year, emphasis on both the should and the more. Why is “read more books” such a popular resolution, and what other frameworks might we bring to thinking about what ​reading means in our lives?

Creative Book Storage Solutions for Every Home and Budget

As a book lover, your book collection can be the most treasured part of your home, displayed as a centerpiece for all to see. But sometimes, your book collection seems to have a mind of its own, outgrowing its tidy shelves, unwieldy piles appearing in corners of every room. It happens to the best of us! Not to worry, there’s always an answer if you’re willing to think outside the box (or the traditional bookshelf). I’ve got ten creative book storage solutions for homes of every shape and size, and for every budget.

Jenna Bush Hager and Random House Publishing Group Partner to Publish Emerging Writers

Now, she’s turning that bestseller-making energy to emerging writers. Her media company, Thousand Voices, and the Random House Publishing Group (RHPG) are partnering to launch an innovative publishing program. It’s simply titled “Thousand Voices x RHPG,” and will work with emerging writers across a range of genres—including suspense, romance, literary fiction, and memoir—editors, and publishing teams across RHPG’s imprints to publish books. During each book’s launch, Bush Hager will team up on a marketing campaign to publicize the book (that will be separate from her book club).

The Bestselling Books of the Week, According to All the Lists

This week’s bestseller lists are reporting on sales from the end of December, a time when very few books are published. So it’s no surprise that most of the books here are familiar titles. Only one hasn’t appeared on this round-up in previous weeks: The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins, who you may know from her podcast. This new self-help book was—puzzlingly—published on December 24th.