Using Awards Lists As a RA Tool: RUSA Adult Books and Media Awards including the Andrew Carnegie Medal Winners

This is part of my ongoing series on using Awards Lists as a RA tool. Click here for all posts in the series in reverse chronological order. Click here for the first post which outlines the details how to use awards lists as a RA tool.

Yesterday, RUSA announced all of the Adult Books and Media Awards winners. 

Before I get to the links too the current winners, I want to remind you all that the entire backlist for all of these awards are available with one easy click on the RUSA Books & Media Awards Landing page here. The 2026 winners will be added soon, but 2025 and previously are all there, organized by award.

Remember, all of these awards lists are created by adult librarians from across the country, who do the work to create them over the course of the entire year as a committee. Their goal is to choose titles that are excellent choices for general adult audiences. These are the best of the best of 2025. These are titles you need to make sure your library owns.

The lists below encompass literary fiction, genre fiction, nonfiction, cookbooks, audiobooks and more with backlist access to all awards here.

First up is the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. You can click through to see the winners for this year, pervious years, and get information about the ceremony at ALA Annual.

Second, is the less prestigious, but in my opinion much more useful and fun, RUSA CODES Reading List awards. From the site:

Established in 2007 by the CODES section of RUSA, The Reading List seeks to highlight outstanding genre fiction that merit special attention by general adult readers and the librarians who work with them.

The Council, which consists of twelve librarians who are experts in readers’ advisory and collection development, selects one book from each of eight different categories. The eight genres currently included in the council’s considerations are adrenaline titles (suspense, thrillers, and action adventure), fantasy, historical fiction, horror, mystery, romance, science fiction, and relationship fiction. However, the Council is constructed in such a way to be adaptable to new genres and changes in contemporary reading interest.

This year's winners are not up on the awards page website yet, but the announcement can be found here. As it says above there are 8 categories-- all genre based! Each category has a winner. That titles gets an annotation [which you can use to book talk the title to a patron] and 3 readalikes. There is also a short list of other titles as well. 

This means that for each of the 8 categories you have 8 titles that you can trust for each genre. That is 64 genre titles at your fingertips just this year alone! And then, take into account that the Award homepage goes back to 2014, and, well, try not to explode with genre resource happiness.

Also, it is VERY important to note that these are genre titles picked NOT by genre specialists, rather by general adult services librarians. That's what I love about this list. It reflects what is most appealing to a wide audience, not just hard core fans of each genre.

The rest of the awards are listed below:

• 2026 Notable Books List: "The Notable Books Council, first established in 1944, has announced the 2026 selections of the Notable Books List, an annual best-of list composed of 26 titles written for adult readers and published in the US including fiction, nonfiction and poetry. The list was announced today during the Reference & User Services Book & Media Awards Virtual Ceremony."
• Announcement of this year's books
• Backlist access

• 2026 Listen List: "The Listen List Council of the Collection Development and Evaluation Section (CODES) of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) has released the 2026 selections of the Listen List: Outstanding Audiobook Narration. This year’s committee evaluated 340 titles with a total listening time of more than 3,496 hours.  The final deliberation produced a list of twelve winners. This award highlights extraordinary narrators and listening experiences that merit special attention by a general adult audience and the librarians who advise them. "
• This one features annotations and listen-alikes
• Announcement of this year's audiobooks
• Backlist access

• 2026 Sophie Brody Medal: "The Sophie Brody Medal is given to encourage, recognize and commend outstanding achievement in Jewish literature. Works for adults published in the United States in the preceding year are eligible for the award."
• Announcement of this year's Medal winner and shortlist honor books
• Backlist access