The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Yapyap

...heck, on GoodReads, that means “I liked it”; most of my books are 3* reads!

It's the same for me, with my personal ratings in calibre. The majority of my read books are 3 stars, and that means I did get some enjoyment out of it. 4 stars is rare and means an exceptional read for me. 5 stars is extremely rare. And 5 stars doesn't necessarily mean the book was perfect or a literary masterpiece, it just means I enjoyed it to an extraordinary degree. I've given 5 stars to books that objectively are not particularly well written.

On a public site I'd probably use 4 stars instead of 3, but I never post my ratings in public.

If I didn't like the book, but the experience was subjective and not because it was poorly written, then it'll usually be 2 stars. 1 star is for something I disliked extremely or was just really badly written.

[Courant]

Originally Posted by Yapyap

For me, GoodReads doesn’t in any way represent any attempt at “objective” reviews - I see it essentially as a micro-blogging-review site for people to jot down their own personal thoughts about the books they’ve read, and star ratings are completely dependent on people’s very subjective enjoyment or whatever factors bias them towards whatever star rating they give.

I don’t think many people on GR really even write their reviews intending them for others although some obviously do - they’re still largely written for people’s own benefit (for example I’ve occasionally looked at my review of a book I don’t ever remember reading but apparently did 5-6 years earlier, back when I still wrote down my thoughts on what I had read, and see that a) I’d read it, b) what I thought about it).

So a 1* review because a book had spiders in it seems completely fine to me - and also, having the reader note that it had spiders and they hated that, seems actually more useful than just a star rating with no explanation.

I do very occasionally look at other people’s reviews when it’s a book I’m feeling weirdly unsure about, whether before buying it (trying to avoid the reviews with actual spoilers) or after reading it and feeling like there was maybe something I’d missed, so I’m curious what other people got out of it. Most of the time I don’t bother though.

On a rant note, what I do hate is authors (especially self-published ones, it seems) including stuff like “12,000 five star reviews on Amazon/Goodreads!” in their book description/blurb. I mean, good for your self-esteem, I guess, at least if we assume most of those are by actual people and not a bot army, but not particularly informative for me.

And I also very much dislike it when authors throw tantrums on social media about people on GR / Amazon giving their precious book a 3* review - heck, on GoodReads, that means “I liked it”; most of my books are 3* reads! - and whine about the meanness of people. I’ve seen some even suggest that you shouldn’t leave a review or a rating at all unless it’s 5 stars.

Before I got a GoodReads account looked up books and just looked at the rating number, so it obviously makes a difference to sales for authors. Still, I agree that a 3 star review should be seen as a positive review, but a lot of people don't see it that way.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Courant

Before I got a GoodReads account looked up books and just looked at the rating number, so it obviously makes a difference to sales for authors. Still, I agree that a 3 star review should be seen as a positive review, but a lot of people don't see it that way.

On Goodreads, a new book's star rating could be totally worthless until the book is old enough and actually has enough star ratings.

The problem is that a log of new books (even before being released) get rated by people who have not read the book. So the book can have a lot of ratings that are totally worthless.

[Yapyap]

I tend to see any overall Goodreads rating between, say, 3.5-4.25 as “okay, this is a book that is probably decent and enjoyment is just a subjective thing”.

If a book’s overall rating is very close to 5, I’m thinking “enthusiastic fans have arrived en masse” (books most often seem to get a lot of 5* ratings before release, if it’s an author with a lot of enthusiastic fans or an upcoming book in a series with a lot of fans); if a book’s overall rating is less than 3, then that makes me raise an eyebrow and assume there are some more objective reasons there than just taste.

But I don’t ever really look at the rating as such beforehand - I mean, I see it, if go there to enter a “currently reading” book, but I don’t determine my reading choices based on overall star ratings.

(In those rare cases, and I do mean rare, where I’m potentially interested in a book but something about the description or the “vibes” it gives off gives me pause, I’m more likely to go and look at a couple of 1* reviews to see what people hated about it - sometimes that makes me go “ok, yeah, not a book for me”, other times it’s “oh, okay, I think I might actually enjoy it then”.)

[JSWolf]

I sometime look at the rating and go look at the real reviews.

[DNSB]

My personal preference is to dump the 1 & 5 star reviews and pay more attention to the 2-4 star reviews. Too many of the 1 star reviews basically read as if the person has never read the book and/or has an axe to grind and the 5 star reviews seem to be mostly from people who are total fans of the author/bots/paid puffery.

[Dr. Drib]

I'm so damned tired of reading yet another tired synopsis concerning demons.

Give me a wet, slobbering slug, and I'll be happy!

ENOUGH DEMONS ALREADY!

[Courant]

Well, most of the books that I have looked at on Goodreads have very little reviews, so that one can read them all. That said, most of them aren't helpful. A lot of the reviews are written as a narrative of the reviewers experience with a summary attached. Some make you wonder if the problem isn't just the reviewers reading comprehension skill. With non fiction books it is even worse. With a fiction book, "I didn't like it" is a legitimate response. However, most reviewers don't have the expertise to review a nonfiction book.