Hello everybody, my name is Rachel and
welcome to my channel Kalanadi. As some
of you are aware, I spent the last three
years - and particularly the last three
months of 2016 - reading the Best Novel
winners of the Hugo and Nebula awards. I
started seeking out these books in 2013
when I was trying to make the jump
between young adult SFF and adult SFF. I
had not really read fiction for fun for
about seven years, and during those seven
years I stopped being a teenager and I
became an adult with adult tastes. And I
was 23 years old and said "I've only read
C.J. Cherryh, Ursula Le Guin, and Terry
Pratchett." They're really have to be
other authors and books out there aimed
adult audiences that I would love. And I
didn't know where to start, so I thought
it would be a brilliant idea to read the
best novel winners from the Hugo Awards,
and then I realized there was huge
overlap between this award and the
Nebula Awards, so I said I was going to read all
of them! There are about 94 unique books
between these two awards and I read about
half of them before I started Booktube,
and I'd read about two-thirds of them
before I started my final push in
September. So if you've been following me
for the last three months, I've done for
wrap-up videos of the 32 books I read or
reread for this project and I cover - I
cover all those books in detail. But
there are a whole other 60 some-odd
books that I have never talked about or
mentioned only briefly, and there's no
way I can cover all of these books and
what I thought about them because I
don't think you guys really care about
all of those. But I wanted to do some wrap-up
videos here at the end of this project
to just cover the highlights. So my first
video is going to be the statistics.
It's basically ratings breakdowns from
various viewpoints. This just summarizes
how I felt about these books in the
overall, between the two awards, between
genre and gender, and by decade. Video two is
the one that everybody wants: it is
favorites and
recommendations. I went through my whole
list and I pulled out maybe three to
four things from every decade to
recommend. Books that I loved but also
ones I would point out for people to read
if you want to get some of the gems from
these two awards rather than maybe
hitting on one of the turkeys first. And
the third video is about the five books
that I DNF'd. Because I attempted to read
all of them, but there were five that I
just couldn't make it all the way
through. And usually [I] sometimes mention
DNFs, but not in a lot of detail. But I think for
this award where I was really trying to
make it through a bunch of the books, I
should mention the ones that I failed at.
Watch whichever videos you are inclined
to, and if you are considering doing a
project like this - reading all the books
that have won some award - I wish you luck,
because it is challenging, rewarding, and
a lot of fun.
