the ask@AAR: Should we do the AAR Top 100 in 2023?
We’ve done the AAR Top 100 poll regularly since 1998. The last one we did, in 2018, garnered so much fury that I swore we were done. And yet… I’m not sure.
What do you think?
Impenitent social media enthusiast. Relational trend spotter. Enjoys both carpe diem and the fish of the day.
One idea might be to make a form with books that got A or B reviews from AAR the last five years and have readers vote on their favorites. All readers would have to do is check boxes of their favorites. I don’t like having to put mine in order of favorites but it would be easy to check 25 of my favorite books. Possible Title: AAR’s Top 100 Books 2019-2023
That’s a good idea – I’d have trouble putting the titles in order, too.
I don’t envision anyone having to list!
As I think about it, what I’d like most would be a Top 100 Books Which Haven’t Made Top 100 Before (or, at the very least, books which only made it once). Some people here have talked about retiring Lord of Scoundrels, but there are plenty of other books on the list for which, yeah, somebody loved it back in 2002, yada yada, the point has been made.
I think using publication date isn’t the best metric to try to deal with the fact that the list has something like 70% overlap year on year. The problem is the overlap, not the year. One example of an author I adore whose best works are not the last 5 years but who has yet to make the Top 100 is Carla Kelly. Her books hold up incredibly well, and I’d like to be able to vote for her.
Keep the 2018 list available; those books will still be there for people to find. Call it a Top 100 Romances Pre-2018 and then the Current Top 100, or whatever.
Or Top 100: The First 20 years. It’s a good milestone for changing it up.
I like the idea of a Top 100 that haven’t made it before list! A new Top 100 that will have 70% of the same books on it isn’t very interesting, especially since we still have access to the earlier polls.
I guess I’m not sure that then it’s really the AAR Top 100–it’s been done for years trusting our readers. I feel if we’re going to do something different, we should call it something different.
I also think it’s one kind of best–that that lasts over time. If I’m new to romance and I can see that there are certain books that have been chosen again and again, I’m likely to think that might be a good place for me to figure out what I do and don’t like.
I vote for doing something different and calling it something different. So my feedback for your original question, should you do another Top 100, would be no, because we have a fairly recent one and the majority of the book probably won’t change. You’ve said it’s a lot of work, and it hardly seems worth it for mostly the same information. But that’s just my opinion, and whatever you decide is fine.
Thanks Carrie. I have a whole year to figure it out! I do like doing one every five years just because it’s a historical record. But something else would be cool too!
I like the idea of dividing the list into categories eg historical romance, paranormal , sci fi romance, etc and I also like the suggestion that categories could be divided by time so that people are not trying to evaluate Jane Austen versus Nora Roberts versus Ilona Andrews. All three of these authors would feature on my list but I appreciate they write very different types of romance. I think one of the weaknesses of the way we voted before was that a prolific author often seemed to end up with split votes between books. Perhaps there could be a section where we answer the questions :
If you had to choose 10 romance authors whose books you would take to a desert island who would they be?
If you could take 3 books (or series) from each of these authors what would they be?
I have always thought one of the purposes of the top 100 poll was to glean from our AAR reading community which authors ( and which of their books) are worth recommending to a new reader and which stand up to the scrutiny of a reread.
I love the Top 100 poll . I often don’t agree with some of the “ winners” but if we all loved the same few authors and type of romance there would be a lot of romance authors who currently meet a reading need for customers who wouldn’t be published.
As a newer romance reader, AAR’s Top 100 list is very helpful. However, I agree with those who say that it is biased towards older books, and that will continue if you use the old list as the basis for the new survey. Asking people to vote only for books they’ve read in the past 5 years makes sense to me. If you haven’t wanted to reread your favorite from 1992 in the past 5 years, is it really your favorite book?
I am curious about a few things. How did you word your survey instructions in 2008? Did each voter only get to vote for one book? How did you prevent people stuffing the ballot box for their favorite author/book? Was there just one round of voting or multiple?
It is not easy to construct a good survey and administer it well, so that you get the results you really intend to get. I know it will be a lot of work, and if you do decide to go ahead with it, I can safely say that it will be very much appreciated by me and many others. And of course it will generate some controversy and fail to satisfy everyone. Hopefully, most of all, it will be a great resource, and a lot of fun discuss and pick apart, just like any “Best Of” list, from the Oscars to the Emmys to the Grammys to the Pulitzers to the Hugos to the Goodreads Awards, etc. Thanks for all you do to make this a fun site and keep the conversation about romance vibrant!
All good points.
AFAIAC the AAR polls are the greatest romance resource on the web. They are literally the first romance pages I bookmarked, so I am obviously, “for”. I am sorry that it was such a struggle for you last time.
After what the website went through the last time you did this, I really think it might be wise to wait until at least 2025 or a later date so you can restructure how the poll was held the previous time. It’s important to diversify the nominations or heavily emphasize that this is a poll determined by popularity versus quality or site owner opinion by making the vote as transparent as possible. If people want to get the names of their favorite authors out or they want a more diverse list they need to get up and vote.
I hear you and I appreciate your feedback.
That said, in 2023, I think our choices will be diverse and hold their own. I trust our readership.
The trouble is the wider world probably does not and it’s the wider world you’ll have to deal with if you just do the same thing over again. Repeating a pattern that got you negative results will just yield more negative results.
I do understand you. But what one person thinks is negative is something that works for someone else. We’ll see how it goes.
You and the website being called racist across multiple social media platforms by several prominent authors was a positive result? I wouldn’t think so from the way you reacted at the time.
I learned so much from that experience. We realized we had to do much better.
So, yes, in its own way, it was a positive thing for AAR. We listened and we worked to change and to improve. We are still trying to improve.
I truly don’t “trust” that the voters are looking at their Goodreads shelves, or their home libraries, or reading spreadsheets, or whatever, and making lists from scratch in a personal and objective way. People even talked in the forums about how they made their ballots by using the old list and then adding in thirty or whatever they had left – I mean, I read the old lists too. Unless the web site makes a dramatic break with its old lists (like by taking them down for the duration of the vote?) this lists will continue to favor what white ladies liked in 1998.
Also I think a lot of votes last time came from people who aren’t AAR regulars. In 2018, the Ilona Andrews writing team went from zero titles to four. Mariana Zapata’s Wall of Winnipeg and Me wasn’t even reviewed here and shot to sixth place? That’s mobilizing fans to pack the ballot box.
The ballot packing was incredibly obvious. And yes, I remember that too.
You can see that happening in practically every Best of or Top whatever vote, whether it’s a something of the year or the month. I think our poll was set up so you could only vote once although I’m sure there are ways of getting round it by using other IP and email addresses. Still, it’s a lot of faffing around and I expect most people only voted once.
But it’s certainly something to bear in mind.
It might be difficult to compile a top 100 that’s inclusive enough for all your readers. I wonder if a literature map limited to romance books nominated by your readership would be a feasible alternative.
Once you start manipulating the criteria it’s not really the Top 100 is it? If more recently published books are good enough then no doubt people will nominate them. Should the most important thing here really be the optics to the ‘outside world’?
I don’t want to manipulate the criteria. I’m working now to see if I can pay for the manpower to have a completely open poll. But I can’t do it without help that I’d have to pay for, I don’t think.
I understand your point, but a site like this depends on publishers and authors making books available to us for review, so we do, to an extent, have to take optics into account. But as Dabney says, any change would be down to a matter of manpower; she puts in a lot of hours to keeping AAR running, as do I, and we just don’t have the capacity to take on the mammoth task of a GOAT romance novels poll. So it’s either finding a way to pay for the help we need, or finding a way to do it in house – which will inevitably mean a change of scale and scope.
I think you actually get a more honest poll when you set up parameters. It’s never the TOP 100 for every reader. It’s the TOP 100 for AAR readers who respond to the poll. That in itself has always been a limiting criteria.
If you set some parameters, then you are getting the favorites for a smaller groups, and that will give a lot more useful information for readers than to lump every romance book ever written into one big pot and stir.
And asking people to only vote on books they’ve read in the past 5 or 10 years makes sense. Voting on something someone liked 20 years ago but probably wouldn’t pick up again because it’s so dated isn’t helpful. It may have been wonderful for that person thenand even a nostalgic favorite, but it doesn’t mean they’d enjoy it today, and also doesn’t mean it’s still a wonderful book. There are classics like Heyer and Austen that I still love (and I reread them every few years) but there are other books I would have voted for 10 years ago that have since gone into my discard pile.
I agree. It’s time to move on. As a voracious reader, it’s all about submitting my best entries then mining the new Top 100 list for great reads. Do what has to be done to maintain the integrity of the vote. There are many lists for the Top 100 for the past 20 years. The next Top 100 list should be for the past 5 to 10 years.
What could be done for the vote is in the submission include the category. Then for the results provide a graph of the sub-category % breakdown within the Top 100.
*category=sub-category
I think it’s a good idea to break up the list in some way, either by date or subgenre. (If you do the latter, I would suggest making it top 50 or so.) I know I lazily add the same books to the top of my list without having reread them — I am not a rereader — so it would be good to challenge us to come up with a fresh point of view.
I also would recommend retiring Lord of Scoundrels. I have to admit, it was an okay read for me, so I was always frustrated to find it coming out on top almost every time.
Not last time!
I went back and looked at the Top 100 for 2018 and have read about 50 or so of them. Many I enjoyed when I read them, but really don’t care for them now. If I hadn’t tried to reread some of these,though, I never would have realized that they no longer work and aren’t just not in my personal Top 100, but are actually in my “discard” pile. All this to say I agree with oceanjasper that people should at least be encouraged not to vote for books they haven’t read/reread in the past 5 years.
Another way to handle that issue, and the issue of lack of diversity, is to split the list into books published before a certain date, and those published after. That still gives a nod to the old classics, like Heyer and Austen, and some nostalgic favorites, but allows for newer authors and works to get highlighted. It also means some of the newer readers have a chance of getting their voices heard. This would mean fewer lists than going by genre, but still have more diversity since books published in the last 5 or 10 years are much more inclusive about race, setting, gender identity, etc. than before.
I like the idea of a before and after type of thing – and Dabney’s idea below of pulling a list of nominations from five years of best ofs etc. would certainly help to pull in newer titles, as we pick releases from a specific year.
I always try to encourage rereading for just this reason. Julie Garwood is an author who, to me, is wallpaper nonsense, but people remember how it felt to read her in 1992 or whatever in a world before Thomas and Duran and Milan etc, and vote based on that. If you read her now, you’d notice.
There’s also the fact that people use previous lists to jog their memory, so we have a huge bias towards books that are already on there. (It’s the only explanation I have for how Whitney, My Love stayed on so long!!!!). Also, the broader, more diverse, and further ranging publications options today, a major pub/airport bookstore type release like Kleypas or a Quinn gets in front of so many more eyeballs than a KJ Charles or a Cecilia Grant, which makes it easier for them to pick up more voters.
I’ve always enjoyed it. It’s a great way to find books I’d not read before. Of course my reactions to the list vary between “Oh yeah, I’d forgotten that and it was really good!” and “That one? Really??? What can they have been thinking?”
A few observations:
The genre is so diverse now that I think ‘Romance’ is too broad a category to be meaningful. Top 100 Historicals, Top 100 Contemporaries, Top 100 Paranormals, etc. would be more useful.
People seem to vote for old favourites out of nostalgia, hence the abundance of Lisa Kleypas, etc. in previous lists. But we all know the feeling of a much loved book not holding up at all on re-reading. I don’t know what to do about that, other than have some kind of rule like you have to have read a book in the last five years to vote for it! So maybe a Top 100 romances published in the last five years would be a more accurate list in terms of actual (rather than remembered) quality, as well as resonance with current reader sensibilities…..
There needs to be a limit on the number of books by a particular author. There is no single romance author who is so head and shoulders above everyone else that they deserve to dominate the list.
The arguments about the results afterwards can be fun. People just need to remember that the final product of a lot of readers’ individual opinions is not going to be a politically correct sampling of the diversity of the genre. If there’s not enough books on the list featuring queer characters or people of colour or whatever other minority group you feel is under-represented, it doesn’t mean romance readers are all terrible people!
These are all very good points – especially the last one. I didn’t see much of the shitstorm on social media around the last poll, but I know others on the team did and that it wasn’t pretty. I think these kinds of polls are interesting snapshots, in the same way “best movie” or “best song” polls are – there are always some classics on the list, but the rest are usually a reflection of lots of other things going on at the time.
It IS a lot of work, but it’s fascinating!
To do categories would be a lot more work!
I do think that readers would be less likely to pick as few authors as they did in the past. The industry itself has broadened so!
I agree. I think with the way things have changed over the last few years, it would be impossible to do a Poll as a free vote any more; you’d get thousands of titles with one or two votes and maybe a handful with ten!
I’m thinking we’d take the current top 100, the AAR Best of for the last five years, and the AAR Reader best ofs from the last few years. We could have space for one write in, maybe for each subgenre?
I’ve just had a look at the 2018 list and read through the comments. I didn’t exactly detect “fury” but it was interesting to view the list as something of an historical/social record. By that I mean it was a snapshot of what people were thinking in 2018 about their favourite books/authors and it can be a comparison with earlier lists/polls and, of course, against future ones thereby identifying shifts in tastes, requirements and the shifts in what publishers/authors view as what their readers want. I realise it’s a huge amount of work for those who produce it but as a look at what was making the list at the time, I think it’s invaluable as a social record. This is the sort of material anyone – academic or not – would relish.
I think most of the real fury was on Twitter…
OK, ta Caz. Something I refuse to get involved with so I missed it except any reference that might have been made to it here at AAR. Poisonous and pernicious creation, Twitter IMO. ;-)