Quote:
Originally Posted by Barty
http://www.vox.com/2015/4/8/8370227/...dreads-ratings
Turns out he did not know the ratings were public. He thought they were only a way to get recommendation for books he likes. In other words, he was being truly honest!
Harper Lee probably gives his books 2 stars, so it's all good 
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LOL.
Quote:
On Goodreads, people share what they are currently reading and give books they've finished a star rating. They also have the option of writing a brief review. Both can be viewed by anyone who follows a given user. That was what Rushdie didn't quite understand when he started giving brutally low ratings to some of literature's most beloved works.
Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize–winning To Kill a Mockingbird got only three stars. Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis's award winning first novel, which Time declared one of the 100 best novels published since the magazine's inception, received a single measly star. Only a few novels, including F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, were deemed worthy of a perfect five-star rating.
Almost immediately, Rushdie's followers on Goodreads questioned his judgment.
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Several takeaways, off the cuff. Other (and better) ones will doubtless occur to me after I press "Submit Reply":
- RTFM, especially if you're a public persona
- Despite what TFM, the terms of service, and the privacy rules state at any given time, never trust social media - or any other online venue - with any information you wouldn't air publicly
- It's prudent to use an alias on public media because of #2, especially if you're a public persona
- With regard to tastes in books (or anything else), diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks
- Despite the popularity of phrases such as "the wisdom of crowds", sometimes crowds can be dumb, especially on social media (except of course, most MobileReaders)