It is fascinating to me how many Booker Prize or National Book Award winning books have "low" ratings on Goodreads.
The pedantic in me relishes this, because if I enjoy the book, then the rest of the people must be missing something, but it's interesting nonetheless.
by less_vs_fewer5
4 Comments
This year my Book Club reads included Prophet Song (Booker Prize) and Remains of the Day (Nobel Prize for Literature) and they produced polarising results, a very ‘loved it or hated it’ situation. In 2025, we are going to try and have criteria we rate against to see the impact it has on ratings. For example: craft, entertainment value, character development etc.
Point being, I’ve seen highly awarded books score low in real life amongst friends 🙂
Pulitzer Prize winners have the same pattern. I think the difference is a “normal” reader, like me, and someone that has studied literature often has very different views on what is “good”.
The average award winning book is relatively challenging, and the average reader reads for recreation rather than to be challenged intellectually. They also may not have the reading comprehension to really understand a more complex work. I don’t mean to be snobby, but I think it’s a factor.
You’d be surprised how much can be attributed to marketing. “Leave the World Behind” won a book prize but got heavily panned. If you scroll down to reviews, it’s mostly people complaining it’s a shitty mystery thriller. When that’s not really the genre it’s targeting. But it definitely was marketed as such.