Let me just go ahead and say that I’m not looking for recommendations in this post. I’m just trying to discuss how the Goodreads ratings work.
So, recently I’ve been on a reading mood and I’m having some trouble finding how exactly to get good recommendations from Goodreads (which seems to be the “best” source for user based ratings).
Let me try to explain myself a bit: I watched quite a good deal of movies, and generally decide what to watch next based on IMDB and Letterboxd ratings. Now, of course that this isn’t exact science since a 1-5 or 1-10 is always subjective, but generally, both these websites give a fairly precise rating at least for the artistic quality of a film. Examples: While you may not like a film like Godfather, Solyaris or 2001, the fact that they are highly rated is not only for the “enjoyment factor” but also because they present a lot of artistic qualities that are not easily found in other films. Of course, there are some low rated movies (on the low 5s) that are still quite good, but you have to dig through a lot of shit to get there.
Now, back to books, it seems that the examples I gave don’t quite apply to Goodreads ratings. There are some 4.2+ books that are incredibly bland and it’s kinda unbelievable that they’re so high. I won’t mention any specific case to not offend anyone, but it seems that if your book has the “Young Adult” and “Fantasy” tags combined, you’re guaranteed a 4 at least.
Then again, when you get some books regarded as classics, you usually see things in the low 3’s which, for a new reader as myself, makes it all very confusing.
So, for me it’s obvious that the system that I used to films doesn’t seem to work for books, so, that brings me to two main questions:
1 – Why exactly does this happen in Goodreads? Is it something as a “readers guilt”, where people feel they should give 5 stars to every book they read since they spent so much time doing it?
2 – Is there a similar website with a better system for literature? Or should I just follow lists and similar stuff?
by LyzbietCorwi