Seriously, you can find books that romanticize violence getting a 4.0 average rating, or stories with plot holes somehow earning high marks. It's like everyone’s taste is in a parallel universe!
I get it, everyone likes different things. Heck, I've been guilty of giving a 5-star rating to a movie with terrible CGI and a laughable plot, just because it was fun. But at least on Letterboxd, you can usually trust the average rating to give you a clue about what you’re getting into. With books, though, everything's getting top marks! It makes it hard to tell if a book is actually good or just a waste of time.
So, should I start reading every book like it's innocent until proven guilty? Or is there some secret Goodreads magic that I'm missing ? Or is there another app with a reliable average rating? Or any way to discover good books that suit my taste ?
by Illustrious_Sink17
10 Comments
It’s worth it to read the comments in depth and do a little extra research on the novel. Check out other reviews outside Goodreads, if you can find them. But I feel you, this is an issue that bothers me. I don’t necessarily expect all the books I read to be award-worthy, but I’ve found a lot of high 4-5 star books on goodreads to not even be fun or interesting from an entertainment perspective. A lot of cut and paste stock characters and plot, bad writing, usually loved for some fan service element that doesn’t make up for the other crap.
People generally read books they like
Newer novels have a lot of people with arcs and free copies of the book that boost the score IMO. There’s also this book club culture of not saying negative things about books and if a book is decent giving it 4 stars— anything else is seen as “mean” for some reason. I don’t get it. To me 5 stars should be reserved for a classic or masterpiece! I don’t trust the stars at all!
Because most people don’t care about the professional TVTroper’s definition of plot holes or whether there’s violence in a fucking fictional story.
I always read the best reviews and the lowest reviews.
I agree we need to reset expectations for ratings…I personally will turn my nose up at anything rated below 4 stars—and yet give 3s to perfectly fine books and 4s for very good…feeling 5s are only for mind-knowingly good (and super rare). It’s out of whack.
A Taco Bell can have a 4.9 rating. It’s all about expectations.
I’ll assume you have bigger qualms, and that these were just two examples off the top of your head, but the average person is not going to give a book a lower score simply because it romanticizes violence or has a plot hole. The latter can often easily be ignored if it’s minor enough, and also isn’t really a big concern in many genres. The former isn’t a concern at all for the majority of people. Plenty of books, movies, video games, etc. glorify violence of all kinds, that doesn’t make them bad pieces of media.
So I’m not just being critical, a better option is to look for Goodreads reviewers whose tastes are similar to your own, and see what they thought of specific books. Or you could use a platform like StoryGraph, which I find has more reliable ratings and allows you to filter out certain types of content when you’re looking for new books.
I I think the difference is that most people would be willing to finish a bad movie, but will likely quit a bad book early on. Then they’re less likely to write a review
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