Finally voted for ABC Radio National’s “Top 100 Australian Books”. If you haven’t already, I urge you to vote before the deadline of Thursday 1 October. Here are my thoughts after voting:
1. The voting website has a great number of Australian books, arranged alphabetically by the first letter of the author’s first name. You’ll find the books you’ve already read and loved, revisit those you’ve read but long forgotten, discover more you haven’t read but want to, and explore those you have never heard of but look great. You can also add books that are not already on the list.
My feeling: “Oh, there are so many worthy Australian books!” Which translates as: “Oh no, there’re so many good Australian books I haven’t read!”
2. Vote for those books you know are great but haven’t read, or those you have personally read and enjoyed even when they’re not that famous? I prefer the latter, which is why my chosen books may look a bit unusual, with one example being Jay Kristoff’s Empire of the Vampire. Meanwhile, I had to manually add Bryce Courtenay’s Four Fires (2001) and Andrew McGahan’s The Rich Man’s House (2019) because these are lesser known compared to the authors’ other books.
Also, would you vote for those books you haven’t read but have seen their movie/TV adaptations? I choose not to do so, which is why many of the famous and/or classic Australian titles are not on my list.
3. UX/UI matters: The voting website via @abcradionational is really well designed. The voting mechanism is truly convenient and efficient, making it super easy to add titles to or remove them from the top 10 list, with those on the “waitlist” loud and clear for further consideration. It is also easy to manually add more titles to the list. Just type in the title or the author’s name, and the system will quickly come up with the book for you to pick. Finally, the system automatically generates an image of your top 10 books so you can post it on bookstagram!
Meanwhile, I wish I could have all the Australian books easily generated as a list, for future reading reference. Perhaps a whole bunch of screenshots would work, to be taken close to the voting deadline to allow for more addition of books.
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