Beyond Reality's Books of the Year for 2010

[Stefan, Group Founder + Moderator (Retired)]

Straight from the department of "Better Late Than Never", here are Beyond Reality's Books of the Year for 2010. These are the two books (one SF, one fantasy) which received the highest average scores, based on your votes. (Usually these are announced once the December book polls end in February, but, well, anyway, here we are. *cough*)

So! The winners are:

Fantasy:
Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente, with an average score of 8.53.

Science Fiction:
Anathem by Neal Stephenson, with an average score of 8.44

The Beyond Reality Hall of Fame has been updated accordingly.

And a quick note about the Hall of Fame: as our older members maybe know, we stopped setting up the scoring polls, mainly because we weren't getting enough votes for the scores to be statistically significant in any way. For example, the 2010 winners above only received 13 and 16 votes, respectively. Because of this, and because it was frankly a bit of a pain to set up those polls and tally up the scores every month when barely anyone voted anyway, I decided to end this feature as of 2011.

However, GoodReads already has a wonderful 5 star voting system, so we can all still score our Books of the Month. In addition, I contacted GoodReads Support suggesting they add a feature to the site that would show the average score a book receives based on just the members of a group - basically the same thing you see now on a book's page, but only counting Beyond Reality member scores. I've been told this is in the works, and as soon as it appears, I can go back and collect the scores for our books from 2011 and later and start a new Hall of Fame using this system. The advantage of this will be that you won't need to cast a new vote in a poll, so I'm guessing we'll suddenly have many more votes for each book and, because of this, a statistically more significant result. Let's hope GoodReads gets around to creating this feature soon (and for those of you who moderate your own groups here, maybe take a moment to send in the same suggestion, because I was told that the more people request a feature, the higher it goes on their priority list in terms of features they are working on...)

[Candiss]

Stefan wrote: "a feature to the site that would show the average score a book receives based on just the members of a group - basically the same thing you see now on a book's page, but only counting Beyond Reality member scores. I've been told this is in the works..."

THAT...would/will be an awesome site feature. I very much hope it comes to fruition.

Regarding the books: I loved, loved Palimpsest and feel a (perhaps disproportionate) sense of guilt that I have still not read Anathem. I mean to, and it's physically sitting on my shelf right near me...but it's such a huge investment of time and reading energy, and I (like pretty much everyone else here) have so very many other things I want to read. I find that I only throw myself into such long novels under very specific circumstances: away from home for over a week and wanting to only take one book, middle of a heat wave (I find it useful to escape in any way I can, as I hate heat.), recovering from serious illness or injury, etc. I know - I really should read it, because it's awesome...no need to poke me about it, I assure you.

Thanks for compiling this info, Stefan. It's nifty to see. (And I totally understand why you decided to end the feature, as well.)

[Ron]

For those who enjoyed Anathem, may I direct your attention to Galileo's Dream? Similar grand tour of human knowledge, similar approach to time; comedy, tragedy, politics, action and a quantity of popes: what more could you ask?

[Kara]

Neat. Hope GoodReads adds the new feature. =)

[Helen]

I did wonder whether I was supposed to do a separate score somewhere. It'll be good to see how everyone votes and which book comes out top.