Rating Art

Every time I finish a book, I log it on Goodreads, give it a star count, and write a brief review. I do it (like I said yesterday) because those reviews make a difference to the author. I have a personal policy of not rating something if it will be below three stars. In those cases, I would just log the book and move on.

I read something that made me think about this whole system of rating and reviewing art. It’s so subjective. There are plenty of books that I can admire, quality-wise, that I didn’t enjoy, and other books that will never win major awards that I thought were brilliant.

She asks why our impulse is to immediately decide how much we like it vs. let it sit, unrated. She writes: “I’ve been trying to stop doing this—giving a work of art an immediate thumbs up or thumbs down, like I’m rating a mop on Amazon. But the habit seems to spring from my subconscious: watch movie, submit verdict. This is how I’ve been trained to respond.”

And because my four-star read is different from your four-star read, and how I would rate something ties into how I was feeling at the moment while I read the book, so many of those stars are completely useless in using to decide how you may feel about a piece. She writes: “The aggregate star ratings on Letterboxd presume to communicate something standardized, but in fact they give cover to chaos … Book ratings on Goodreads raise the same questions.”

These are all great questions. I don’t have answers, and I am going to keep writing those tiny reviews because I know (as an author) that they matter to authors. They help with book sales or making the decision to check out a book from the library. I could write the little review without the stars, but would that review hold as much weight without the star anchor to immediately give context to the words below it? Unsure. But this made me think. A lot.