Elizabeth Gootzeit

I have mixed feelings about using Goodreads (as I do for most interfaces these days). Reading goals can pull me out of reading slumps, just as word count goals can get me writing. And I do enjoy seeing what my friends are reading.

Of course, once once you click “I’ve finished this book!” on Goodreads, a pop-up appears prompting you to review and/or rate what you’ve just read. I almost always panic and click “no rating.” If I just loved a book, and/or feel an awesome but relatively smaller author might actual benefit from my support, I’ll click 5 stars.

(Disclaimer: I know plenty of folks have their own internal rating system that maps onto stars just fine, just rambling about myself.)

My empathy for fellow writers makes me hate that star rating. Reducing the countless hours, emotion, stress, and labor that go into creating a book to one little number seems unfair. Cruel. Reductive.

Even if something wasn’t my favorite, clicking anything other than 5 stars feels insulting. Thus the panic. Thus the lack of rating.

We read for all sorts of reasons, and your mileage may vary on any given book depending on myriad factors. Maybe you can tell that a book is competently written, but you just didn’t happen to connect. Maybe a book doesn’t have the “best” writing but still offered a pleasant distraction from the real world. Maybe a book describes something not represented in media before and you feel less alone—a five star experience in and of itself.

Reader expectations going into a book are going to shape your review once you’re done (or DNF’d). It’s why marketing is key; promising an audience a certain kind of book and not delivering is a surefire way to negative reviews. You don’t want to hook the audience who won’t like your book, but rather seek readers who will appreciate it for what it is.

But if you get sucked into the quagmire of Goodreads reviews as I sometimes do… Man, people are very bold in criticizing not just a writer’s execution but their (inferred) intent. (As in, “They should have done this, and they didn’t!” or “Maybe if you were a teenager you would enjoy this [book marketed toward teenagers].” Okay…)

Some of it reminds me of judging on The Great British Bake Off. A contestant who makes a big swing and knocks it out of the park gets the handshake, they get Star Baker, they might have a shiny new cake stand at the end of the season. But someone who tries that big swing and whiffs it might not how do they measure up against another contestant who played it safe and produced an outstanding result?

I enjoy talking about books and processing them, hence membership in multiple book clubs. But writing a pithy review—man, that’s hard. Probably something to practice. One of the reasons I am doing this blog.

I may still leave out the stars though.

Recently read:

Katabasis by R.F. Kuang

Listening to:

Just starting diving into the Off Book archives. Highly recommend.