On Not Rating Books (Or Why Stars Are a Lie)
I do not rate books anymore.
Authors note
Was talking with a good friend of mine the other day about logging sites we use for books and so on and we did not go down the rabbit whole but I thought I haven’t written about this on my blog now, so here we are.
I do not rate books anymore not because I am above it. I am not above anything. I will rate a taxi driver, a plate of food, a pair of shoes I tried on once and did not buy. I am a modern human with a phone and an opinion about everything, like the rest of you.
But books. I cannot do it.
Every time I try to assign a star rating to a book, something in my brain seizes up like a engine that just gave up on life. Because here is the thing nobody tells you about rating books: the rating changes every time you read it. (revising d-ave here: and same can apply to movies and music bruv, but lets move on, I am making points here)
(and I do re-read. I re-read a lot. I am one of those annoying people who has read the same paragraph six times and still does not know what it means.)(no I am not a retard)
Think about it. You read The Stranger at 17 and it is the most profound thing you have ever encountered. The absurdity of existence! Meursault is a hero! You give it five stars and post about it on Goodreads like you just discovered fire.
You read it again at 25 and Meursault is not a hero. He is a detached weirdo who lets his girlfriend down and does not cry at his mother’s funeral. The book is still good but it is different. You change the rating to four stars.
You read it at 32 after your mother dies and suddenly you understand why Meursault did not cry. The book breaks you in a new way. Five stars again. But a different five stars. A five stars that comes from a different place in your chest.
So which rating was correct? All of them? None of them?
(the answer is none of them, obviously, but try telling that to the algorithm)
The problem with star ratings is that they pretend to be objective. Five stars means “masterpiece.” One star means “garbage.” But those judgments depend on a thousand variables that have nothing to do with the book itself:
- When you read it (mood, age, life circumstances)
- Where you read it (train station at 6 AM, bed at midnight, waiting room at a hospital)
- Who you were when you read it (employed, heartbroken, hopeful, hungover)
- What you needed from it (escape, understanding, confirmation, challenge)
A book you read during a breakup hits different than the same book read during a happy summer. That does not mean the book changed. It means you changed. And if the rating depends on you, what is it actually measuring?
(nothing. it is measuring nothing. but we keep doing it because numbers are easy and feelings are hard.)
Here is something that bothers me even more.
People treat ratings as reliable information. “Oh, this book has 4.5 stars on Goodreads, it must be good.” No. It means that 4.5 is the average of thousands of subjective experiences, each one filtered through a different brain at a different moment. That number is not a review. It is a crowd noise.
And crowds are stupid. We know this. Crowds panic. Crowds follow trends. Crowds gave The Alchemist a 3.9 and Infinite Jest a 4.1 as if those books exist in the same universe. They do not. But the algorithm does not care about universes. It cares about averages.
(seriously, The Alchemist has a 3.9. 3.9! Paulo Coelho has sold more copies than God and I am supposed to trust this system?)
I have been thinking about an alternative. (no this is not a product launch lmfaoo)(but ideas are brewing maybe we never know….)
Not rating books at all. Just recording what they did to you. A sentence. A feeling. A memory of where you were when you read it.
“Read this on a bus from Addis to Bahir Dar. The road was terrible. The book was the only thing that kept me from throwing up.”
That tells you more than any star rating. That tells you the book was a companion in a specific moment. It tells you it had the power to distract you from physical misery. That is a real review.
Or:
“I tried to read this three times and fell asleep every time. Not the book’s fault. My brain was fried from work. Maybe next year.”
Also useful. Honest. Does not pretend to be objective.
The point is: a book is not a product. It is an encounter. And you cannot rate encounters. You can only describe them.
I am not saying stop using Goodreads. I use Goodreads. I have a profile with a shelf and everything. I am a hypocrite like everyone else.(even thought the only books I logged are das Kapital, the bible, wealth of nations, communist manifesto, mien kampf, the Quran)
But I have stopped trusting the stars. I have stopped treating them as information. I look at the reviews, not the numbers. I read the angry one-star review from someone who clearly missed the point and I read the gushing five-star review from someone who clearly needed the book at exactly the right moment. Both are telling me something. Neither is telling me the truth about the book.
The truth about the book is whatever happens when you sit down alone with it and the world goes quiet for a while.
And that cannot be compressed into a star.
do I need a rating system for my blogs…. how would I even implement that?…. interesting