The influential user review site has suffered a year of controversies, from cancelled book deals to review-bombing, and exposed a dark side to the industry
They do have more that just the thumbs up/down, but for the most part I have to read several reviews and pick out the ones that actually tell me what I care about. Even high effort well done reviews just might not mean anything to me if they’re focused on elements that I don’t care about. I think the joke reviews still are “accurate” in the sense that the reviewer goes up or down based on how they feel about the game; they just don’t have useful text.
I personally tend just not to review fiction. I will absolutely tell you what I like about an author or a series, but I have no interest in breaking down the plot or picking apart individual books. (As an example, my favorite author is Karen Rose. I think all of the books in her Romantic Suspense series are straight up masterfully done, own them all on audiobook, and listen 3+ times a year. I will happily give a couple paragraphs about what traits draw me to her writing. I won’t pick and choose between the books and say “this is four star, this is five star”. I happen to find Into The Dark particularly compelling out of the Cincinnati arc, but I’m not going to ever individually break down books in the series to give individual reviews. I basically consider them a single work and read them as such.)
I almost never give fiction less than 4 stars, either. 4 stars is my baseline. 5 is standout. There are some (including wildly popular or cult classics) that I just don’t find interesting, but I’ll just not rate/review them if I don’t have anything to say. On a semi-related note, I see “overrated book” discussions every once in a while and so many of the comments are people falling into the same trap critics do. In a lot of cases they’re picking apart books clearly targeted for kids to maybe YA and reading them like they’re grad students analyzing some classic in an era where every line had 15 different allegories thrown in. You don’t have to pick everything apart like that.
Picking out parts of reviews that you find relevant is a good idea; your enjoyment of any kind of media is subjective and therefore unique to every person. I guess if you can find a particular reviewer with similar tastes, who also happens to have read a lot of the books you’re interested in, their reviews could be a good indicator of whether you’ll enjoy a book. And yes a 4 tends to be my baseline for book reviews; anything less and I didn’t enjoy it that much. 5 is pretty much perfect.
Over-analysis is definitely an issue. It’s inappropriate a lot of the time like you say. Writing a good review is tricky! You have to take into account the target audience, when it was written, whether it’s part of a larger series and so on. Authors and readers are too often obsessed with their overall rating for a book, but the real indicator is what people have actually written in genuine reviews, and whether you agree with that opinion. Unfortunately websites like Goodreads don’t make those reviews easy to find.
They do have more that just the thumbs up/down, but for the most part I have to read several reviews and pick out the ones that actually tell me what I care about. Even high effort well done reviews just might not mean anything to me if they’re focused on elements that I don’t care about. I think the joke reviews still are “accurate” in the sense that the reviewer goes up or down based on how they feel about the game; they just don’t have useful text.
I personally tend just not to review fiction. I will absolutely tell you what I like about an author or a series, but I have no interest in breaking down the plot or picking apart individual books. (As an example, my favorite author is Karen Rose. I think all of the books in her Romantic Suspense series are straight up masterfully done, own them all on audiobook, and listen 3+ times a year. I will happily give a couple paragraphs about what traits draw me to her writing. I won’t pick and choose between the books and say “this is four star, this is five star”. I happen to find Into The Dark particularly compelling out of the Cincinnati arc, but I’m not going to ever individually break down books in the series to give individual reviews. I basically consider them a single work and read them as such.)
I almost never give fiction less than 4 stars, either. 4 stars is my baseline. 5 is standout. There are some (including wildly popular or cult classics) that I just don’t find interesting, but I’ll just not rate/review them if I don’t have anything to say. On a semi-related note, I see “overrated book” discussions every once in a while and so many of the comments are people falling into the same trap critics do. In a lot of cases they’re picking apart books clearly targeted for kids to maybe YA and reading them like they’re grad students analyzing some classic in an era where every line had 15 different allegories thrown in. You don’t have to pick everything apart like that.
Picking out parts of reviews that you find relevant is a good idea; your enjoyment of any kind of media is subjective and therefore unique to every person. I guess if you can find a particular reviewer with similar tastes, who also happens to have read a lot of the books you’re interested in, their reviews could be a good indicator of whether you’ll enjoy a book. And yes a 4 tends to be my baseline for book reviews; anything less and I didn’t enjoy it that much. 5 is pretty much perfect.
Over-analysis is definitely an issue. It’s inappropriate a lot of the time like you say. Writing a good review is tricky! You have to take into account the target audience, when it was written, whether it’s part of a larger series and so on. Authors and readers are too often obsessed with their overall rating for a book, but the real indicator is what people have actually written in genuine reviews, and whether you agree with that opinion. Unfortunately websites like Goodreads don’t make those reviews easy to find.