Book ratings are ruining your reading experience
This is a hate letter
If we step into a bookstore together and you’re lucky enough to lock eyes with a book you’ve never seen before, its cover luring you in, the font a perfect size, the blurb whispering seductively in your ear… and the first thing you do, as you hold the book in your hands and consider taking it home, is check its Goodreads rating, I might lovingly grab your phone and throw it against the nearest wall.
I’d never do that (I promise I’m safe to go to bookstores with), but I have to say I’ve dreamt about it many times before, whenever a friend I was shopping with did the classic phone-pull and left it up to the holy trinity—God, Goodreads and the amorphous shadow of thousands of voters on the internet—to decide whether a book was worthy of being purchased or not. Have I done this before? Probably. Does it still piss me off? Absolutely.
The internet has made it nearly impossible for me to come across things I’ve never heard of before when I’m out there, living my life offline. I recognize every movie poster at the theater and 80% of the books at my local bookstores. It comes with the territory of spending too much time online, researching new releases every month and following thousands of readers on social media—all things I do because they bring me joy, but that also lower my chances of having an exciting encounter with a new book.
Naturally, when that happens, I want to cherish it. I want to go on a blind date with it. Oh, the delights of not knowing! Of having read nothing but a vague blurb on the back and the first paragraph. Of truly judging it by the cover. I don’t care if it has a 2.13 rating on Goodreads, if it’s recommended by The New Yorker. That is none of my business. The world doesn’t get a say in my experience.
It’s not that I have a personal vendetta against reviews; I know they can be useful. I look them up before buying things (tech, the occasional beauty product) and I will, of course, buy books, watch movies and listen to albums because people have spoken highly of them or directly recommended them to me. However, if I’m lucky enough to come across a book that has, until that very moment, managed to remain a stranger to my eyes, there is no way I’ll let reviews inform my purchase.
Ratings, on the other hand, I deeply despise. They serve no purpose; if anything, they’re detrimental to the book in question. Low ratings? I’ll wonder if I should even read it. High ratings? I’ll go in with unrealistic expectations and feel inevitably disappointed when I’m finished.
I understand rating our own books as we read them, as a way to keep track of favorites, but I don’t get why anyone would take other people’s book ratings seriously; they tell you nothing. If you get yourself in front of a crowd of 100,000 people and ask them to shout their opinions on a specific title all at once, you’ll be deafened by an unintelligible roar that reflects precisely no one’s feelings toward said book.
It reminds me of this story I heard about Lieutenant Gilbert S. Daniels, a physical anthropologist who was hired by the US military to design a cockpit for high-speed aircraft in the early 1950s (stay with me, there’s a point to this). They asked him to design it for “the average man”, and the idea was that if one looked at the average of 4000 pilots’ body dimensions, you’d get the perfect template for the cockpit layout. However, Daniels knew that if he calculated the dimensions for that average body, he would design a cockpit fit only for an extremely rare body type. Not one of those 4000 pilots was within range of the calculated average body dimensions.
Ratings are just like that. They’re a faint echo of thousands of individual opinions, resulting in an average that will tell any given reader very little. They’re a one-size-fits-no-one.
Things might’ve been different if ratings were led by niche groups with similar tastes, but that’s not yet the case, as far as I’m aware. And even then, I don’t really trust anyone to determine what I should and shouldn’t read, be it via rating or review. There is not one person in the world whose tastes align fully with mine; who I am changes daily. How could a renowned critic, a TikTok creator, or even a close friend be able to tell me what to consume? If not even I can predict how I am going to react to a piece of media, it seems fruitless to judge it by giving it anything other than a fair, old fashioned chance.
I do get why my friends sometimes look up ratings or reviews before they buy. They may want to check for trigger warnings, or look for a specific theme they want to read about. We all certainly want to save money, time, energy. We want to avoid a negative experience when our time on earth is limited and there is so much out there for us to consume. However, I do believe there’s a thin line that separates saving time from counterproductive filtering.
Because reviews and ratings have been so ingrained in our systems, it has become increasingly more difficult for many of us to deal with things that suck; I, for one, can’t remember the last time I went to a restaurant without looking it up first. And while it is in my best interest to avoid food poisoning and a cricket in my salad, restricting myself to highly rated things automatically disregards a whole plethora of low-rated (or unrated) goodness, like that new family-owned bistro that isn’t yet being blessed by the algorithm gods. Ratings are here to curate my experience, but they end up limiting it more than anything else.
The same thing, I believe, happens with art—we’ve grown so used to being spoon-fed by algorithms, our brains seem to be having a hard time dealing with the prospect of facing something they don’t like. But hating things, disagreeing with things and being positively surprised by a battered €1 copy I found at the second-hand bookshop are all fundamental life experiences. Do I even know what I like if I don’t give myself a chance to face what I might dislike?
Being willing to come across those shitty books and movies and generously giving them the time of day is how we often find new favorites and, ultimately, discover new things about ourselves. Take Tommy Wiseau’s movie The Room, which was considered one of the worst films ever made. It was so ridiculously bad, it ended up becoming a cult movie. I watched it because I heard about how bad it was, and now it’s a reference that I quote way too often. Has it become a favorite because it’s a good movie? Not necessarily, but I’m still glad I watched it.
I often bond with other readers over popular books we both hated, or unpopular books we loved. When the majority seems to disagree with you, finding someone you can relate to feels like you’ve finally found your people. That is only possible because you have, intentionally or unintentionally, exposed yourself to something that surprised you.
At the end of the day, our algorithms aren’t interested in our growth; they’re interested in our comfort. Comfort keeps us coming back because comfort is familiarity, is predictability, is peace; everything else is a wild card.
I know many readers pick up books for comfort, so sticking to what they know works for them might be a priority, and a legitimate one at that. Personally, I get bored easily, so my comfort zone is not my ideal spot. I enjoy books that make me react, even if it’s not always in a positive way. Whether I’m left feeling infuriated, repulsed or fascinated, I’m looking forward to an experience that technology—and anyone, really, myself included—is yet to be able to accurately predict.
Next time we see each other at the bookstore, consider my looming presence a reminder to leave your phone in your pocket before it interrupts a potentially terrific blind date with the book you just spotted on that top shelf. Will you love it? Hate it? Burn it in five business days? I don’t know, and the ratings don’t, either. How cool is that?
Man, I remember leaving a party in Brooklyn one night back in the mid nineties - had about an hour to kill on the train back to Harlem so I grabbed a copy of Henry Roth’s “Call It Sleep” that someone had left on their stoop as a giveaway. Never heard of the author, never heard of the book, but it was better than nothing. By the time I was home it was well on its way to becoming one of my favorite novels of all time. Maybe an extreme example, but a little serendipity can really enhance a reader’s life.
Oh my god Marta this is SO good. I went into my local indie bookstore on Saturday and noted to my boyfriend after we left just how refreshing it was to see different books front and centre. It's a little bit grungy in there and very politically aware, so it was completely different to what I'd find on the shelves in the Waterstones down the road. I loved it.
I'm fortunate that I don't take note of Goodreads ratings or the like before reading a book but I'm definitely in that 'comfort zone' you mention - if other people I know dislike it I probably won't bother (including Substack reviews). I really need to push myself out of this! This month I'm only reading 'darker' stuff which I don't normally pick up and I'm loving it so far, so this is a pretty good example of finding out what else is out there.
A blinkin' amazing post, thank you so much!