Goodreads Gets Read
I struggle with Goodreads. There are things I love about it, things that drive me crazy, and then there is the confusing mess that is their five-star rating system. The good reads, the bad reads, and the ugly reads.
“Wait, did you just stick a movie reference at the beginning of a post about reading?”
Let’s start with the good.
It makes it easy to keep track of books! The ones I’ve read, the ones I’m currently reading, and the ones I want to read someday. As a slow reader (and writer) who takes full advantage of the San Francisco Public Library, it’s great to be able to record what page I’m on. And Goodreads is a reliable place to figure out if a book is part of a series. Once you realize some publishers like to downplay the fact that a book is #2 or #3 in an ongoing saga (in the hopes, I suppose, that you’ll be tricked into buying it and then be forced to go back and buy the first one) you’ll see it happens a lot more often than it should (which is never).
It inspires me to make, keep track of, and share reading goals! And that pushes me to read more. Nice. Reading more is good, right?
It’s a social media site, but for books! You can see what books people you know are reading and what they think about them. It’s full of folks who have strong opinions and know how to write thought-out reviews that I enjoy checking in with now and again. And it’s the best place to read reviews from random people who didn’t like the books I loved and vice versa. Pursuing this cheap lol is one of my many part-time hobbies!
Then there’s the bad.
It makes it easy for Amazon (dot com), one of my least favorite monopolies, to keep track of my reading habits! Goodreads is owned by Amazon, and it seems like its main purpose (even if it’s not its stated goal) is to encourage people to go on Amazon to buy books (and whatever else suits your fancy) while you’re there. They’re more interested in you spending money on new books than in you spending time reading the ones you have.
It inspires me to gamify and obsess over my reading habits! And that pushes me to pick short or “easy” books to read to keep my numbers up. Not so nice. “Reading more” can be good, but focusing on quantity over quality is a surefire way to develop an unhealthy relationship with reading. Unless your goal is to become an insufferable gloat.
It’s a social media site with poorly designed social features— assuming they weren’t designed with the intent of dampening discussion, which is entirely possible. But, I mean, why can’t you “like” a comment? (Or even maybe give them a star rating?) Why can’t you easily go back to “neutral” after you’ve (perhaps accidentally) declared you “want to read” a book? Why do you have to use the unintuitive and draconian-sounding “delete review” button? Also, what’s the point of having different editions in your database if they all get collapsed into one data point at certain levels? I don’t even know if I’m describing it right, it’s so confusing. And I don’t feel like digging into the details, because it’s too frustrating. Just know that while it may be important to you that you, say, give three stars to a print edition but four to the audio, those distinctions won’t stay reliably discrete across the website and app. And why do both the website and app feel so uninviting? I should be excited and/or comforted to land on a book-based website. Instead, I’m blasted into brown-on-beige boring oblivion.
It’s possible that I want the impossible. Maybe it’s a “me problem” and I’m like some clueless dude on Facebook complaining that “all TikTok is is just some underage girls doing sexy dances in their underwear,” unaware that the algorithm is what you make of it. Yet I can’t help but feel like it could be a lot better.
#politics!
And finally, the ugly:
As frustrating as the “bad” above is, it’s the Goodreads Star System that really drives me up the fucking wall.
There are only 5 ratings to choose from (one for each star!) and everyone on that site seems to have come down on one of two ways to interpret and implement those five-pointed bastards. Either the high school version or the elementary school version.
The high school version is basically a star version of the classic A through F grading system. 5 stars is an A, 4 stars is a B, etc. This is how I think the people who created Goodreads wanted it to be used. I can’t be sure because I couldn’t find any statement (official or otherwise) from Goodreads about it but people do refer to it. I don’t know if they deleted it or if I’m just incapable of Googling on a high school level. This rating system is the better of the two, but it’s only okay. 5 options are far too few options. I give it a C.
Or I would, anyway, except that Cs, or 3 stars, while supposedly representing the “average,” aren’t really seen that way. Especially by people who read with enough enthusiasm to use Goodreads. We’re a self-selecting group who probably paid too much attention to grades in school. And to us, Cs are bad. No one wants to think that most of the books they read are “C books” though definitionally your average book should be average.
This thought process, I think, proceeded to lead to the devolution to what is now the more common way to use the Goodreads Star System. The elementary school version. Remember how when your age was still a single digit and you’d only get one of three grades on your report card? It’s like that. Where I grew up it was either excellent, satisfactory, or unsatisfactory. Translated to the Goodreads system that’s 5 stars for excellent, 4 stars for satisfactory, or 3, 2, or 1 for the dreaded, near-unthinkable unsatisfactory. Basically, everyone felt so bad giving books a 3 — even if they only kinda liked it— that 4 became the new middle ground. We, as a group, managed to take a perfectly mediocre system and somehow make it worse.
So for a while, as a form of protest, I guess, I used to refrain from giving any star rating. The Sixth Star.
”Oh great, another movie reference in a book blog.”
I thought that since I didn’t like the system it was best just to not participate in or even understand it— like the electoral college (#politics! #again). And maybe I’ll go back to that. I don’t know. I’m not setting anything in stone, merely in silicon and stuff, which is technically at least partially stone, now that I think about it.
But I want to participate! I want to be involved. I’m tired of holding back on sharing my opinion, afraid of being misunderstood. And I couldn’t help but notice that no one reads my reviews. My little theory is that it’s at least in part because I don’t give star ratings. And I’d like to get some interaction with other people (and/or more people over here on my website). Plus most books have at least thousands of reviews and, like a California resident voting for the POTUS, my opinion won’t change the outcome (#politics! #ruleofthree!).
So I thought it’d be fun to maybe give stars out, but not before I wrote up this (incredibly long) caveat. I needed to explain myself (to myself, in a way,) before I began handing out stars. A little train of thought that I can direct people to who might be keeping track of what the stars mean to me and/or who wanna know why I gave a specific book the “wrong” number of stars.
And now, after 1200-odd words of mostly unnecessary qualifying preamble, I present to you my own interpretation of star ratings:
Fiction
Fiction has themes, characters, writing, plots, world, vibes (lol), and probably one or two other qualities which affect my enjoyment. So no quick breakdown about what the thinking is there. It all just churns around in my head until I come up with a number.
1 Star: A bad read! This wasn’t very good at all, and I regret wasting the time I spent finishing it. Maybe I didn’t even finish it, but I read enough to know it’s terrible. Not just “not for me” but not for anyone. Like I don’t even understand how it got published. I hope to have very few of these. Maybe one or two a year. At most. Will wonder if the author wrote any other books and check to see if they have out of morbid curiosity. I’ll probably avoid reading more from this author.
This also includes books that might otherwise be 2 stars but the author is well known and/or well regarded and so deserves to be held to a higher standard, which is how Clive Barker’s Tortured Souls “earned” its place here. (C’mon, Clive, I read Weaveworld in the 90s and remember really liking it!)
2 Star: A mediocre read! I finished it. Maybe it was a bit of a struggle in places but mostly it was just fine. Or it was a disappointment. Might have contemplated giving up. Maybe it was good until it served up a bad ending. I’ll be hesitant to read more from this author.
Sadly, despite the interesting idea, Gilded Cage by Vic James is one of these.
3 Star: Literally a good read! Like, a solid book that I was happy I read. Not perfect. Not “great” but maybe close at times. I probably won’t think about it too much after I’ve finished it. But I’ll keep an eye out for — or at least be open to— more from this author.
The Monsters We Defy fits in here pretty well.
3.5 Star: The most glaring absence in any five-star system. These are the Vexers. The only half-star category that gets a mention, because it’s the area around which I agonize the most. In a ten-star system, 3.5 translates to 7— not only one of the most popular numbers in history, but one of the most popular David Fincher movies in history as well.
“You do read these books, right?”
And so it seems like a lot of books gravitate to the 3.5 a lot more naturally than to a 3 or 4. I put Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperfield here. Yes, it just won the Pulitzer Prize, and no, if now is the moment you decide to stop reading this, I cannot blame you.
4 Star: A great read! I loved it. It made me think about the themes/ daydream about the characters for a while after I was done reading it. Looking forward to reading more from the author and will go out of my way to try to read more of them.
The Lies of Locke Lamora is a good example, though I still haven’t read the sequels yet!
5 Star: An amazing read! This is the shit. Near perfection. Holy fuck. I loved it. Maybe changed how I think about writing and the world in general etc. Or it just clicked with me on a personal level. I might have to stop myself from reading all of this author’s work too quickly. Books like Pride and Prejudice (skip past my “review” and check out my “reading progress” for a fun flashback to the pandemic of 2020), and Parable of the Talents come to mind. And stay on my mind.
Or…
I already knew this author in real life.
Nonfiction.
While most of what I read is fiction, I do read some non-fiction. The quality of a nonfiction piece of writing is basically dependent on the information given and how it’s presented. So nonfiction books have two spectrums I base them on, more or less. The info aspect fits into 3 levels and the writing can either elevate it or pull it down. So the information will get most nonfiction a 2, 3, or 4. Eye rolling, eye-opening, or somewhere in between. And then the presentation of those facts moves it accordingly. Though nonsense (especially if we’re talking about racist, sexist, or any other kind of hateful nonsense) would have to be incredibly well-written to earn a 3. I want that to “go without saying” but I’m not sure it does?
1 Star: Riddled with errors, dry writing, or just plain filled with misinformation, like The Secret.
2 Star: Interesting but hard to get through or would be good but it’s just too dry. Also, well-written books that reach conclusions that are inaccurate or argue for things I (still) don’t agree with, like Pinker’s Enlightenment Now! Facts may not care about feelings but I have feelings about the selection and implementation of your facts, Steven. To quote my favorite quotable movie, he’s not wrong, he’s just an asshole.
3 Star: Solid and interesting. These maybe fill a few gaps in my knowledge and are relatively easy/pleasant to get through but probably don’t have (m)any aha moments (Caesar’s Last Breath) Or they’re really interesting but it was a slow read.
4 Star: Books that are a little dense but give me a lot to think about and/or change my perspective on something, or books that mostly work to fill in gaps in my knowledge but are enjoyable reads. Powers and Thrones somehow fits both of those descriptions. I liked reading it (except when I was tired) and I have a much better sense of the Middle Ages now. For entirely different reasons, I chose to give the captivating and heart-wrenching I’m Glad My Mom Died four stars too.
5 Star: Well-written and fascinating, with a presentation of novel ideas and connections that will stick with me for a while. Reading it feels like one long aha moment. The Dawn of Everything is one of those books.
Or…
I already knew this author in real life.
Read Alouds
Oh and sometimes I include the books I read to my children. (One year I included all the books I read to them.) These ratings are all over the place and are mostly a factor of how it felt to read it to my kids and how much they seemed to enjoy the experience.
Or…
I already knew this author in real life, in which case they get…. 5 stars!
And that’s it! I do want to stress that there is no pretense of objectivity here. Our relationship with books is incredibly subjective, (unless, I suppose, you’re in the publishing industry, and somehow only in it for the money). Our experience while reading them will depend on a lot of factors: How old we are when we read them. How we feel about our life that day (or, more accurately, how we feel about our life across the span of days it takes to read it). Our experience with the subject. Our demographical situation. Etc. And while looking back at old reviews to write this, I noticed some books I read and reviewed years ago have a rating that does not reflect how I feel about them now. Some of those I changed, some I didn’t bother to. So please take my little book reviews with the tiniest grain of salt, possibly not even visible to the naked eye— especially if you’re the book’s author. Like I said at the start, this is where Goodreads gets ugly, and the stars I give might say less about the book I’m rating and more about the person doing the rating.
Is this need to meticulously (over)explain all of this a function of my OCD? Maybe. Are the caveats it’s couched in concessions to my would-be perfectionism? It’s definitely possible. But that’s something only my therapist can tell me…. And she dropped me as a client as soon as she discovered I gave her a solid 3 stars on Yelp.
