Stars and tripe: some thoughts on the star rating system
I am traumatised by the process of star rating books.
Here’s a sample of my ‘how to star rate’ thought process (on a romance with a transgender heroine that I recently read).
Oooh, transgender, I’m glad this is written.
Cool characters, enjoying this.
Hmm, I want more info on some trans issues.
– This isn’t a textbook, you spanner. Get your own info.
Lots of Big Issues under discussion here, is that detracting from the romance a bit?
– Yes, but how can you write about trans* people in this day and age without tackling the issues?
– OK, but this is primarily a romance.
– Yes, but in the cultural context –
– No, you should be judging it on its own merits as a romance, not as part of the cultural context.
– What are you, stupid? You can’t ignore cultural context.
– But then you’re not reviewing the book, but what the book is trying to do, which is a different thing.
Can we get back to the story please? I was enjoying that.
– Well, I think the story was informed by the necessary political context.
– Well, I wanted the focus to move more fully to the romantic relationship.
Shut up. Both of you.
I gave it four stars.
I recently read another book. It was a pretty reasonable romance, some very good points, but there was a secondary plot element that left me gaping. The hero does something appallingly crass, setting off a chain of events leading to two deaths. The hero doesn’t notice his own culpability, nobody in the book blames him, and I honestly can’t decide if the author presented this neutrally for the reader to interpret or if she didn’t notice that her hero’s act was the direct cause of this disaster.
I literally cannot star this book. 3.5 for the romance, a star vacuum sucking credit from all surrounding books for the hero’s action. But how is that fair? The story doesn’t applaud the hero’s action any more than condemning it. Would I give A Fine Balance a 1 star because characters do awful things to each other? Does it make a difference if the author intended to evoke this reaction or not? How do I know?
Then there’s standards. I would give The Old Curiosity Shop 3 stars, because that’s where it is as a Dickens novel for me. But 3 stars is what I have recently given a fantasy novel that didn’t hold my attention very well but had a couple of good scary bits. How is that fair, or even sane? Then again, if everything was judged on the same scale, where The Master and Margarita, Riddley Walker and Bleak House are 5 stars, then virtually everything else ever written would be between 2 and 1, and we’d need to go to two decimal places to make any meaningful judgements.
It’s possible that I’m overthinking this. However, the impossibility of reducing a book to a number between 1 and 5 on any meaningful scale is such that I am discouraged from leaving reviews at all, which is the worst possible result for readers and authors alike. (In general, I mean. Not my reviews in particular. They’re not that good.)
Obvious answer: stop star rating books. But you have to star rate to review on Amazon. And if the people who are more concerned with fairness/accuracy don’t rate, that gives a disproportionate voice to ‘I didn’t like the cover, 1 star,’ or ‘I wanted a book about hard currency but misread the title The Joy of Cats as The Joy of Cash. This was no use to me as it was full of cat pictures. 1 star.’
My conclusion from all this: a thoughtful reviewer has a far harder job than is often acknowledged. I think I’ll just stick to writing books.
You described my thought process exactly, even with Dickens. I hate 5 stars, it’s not enough.
Five Stars. Love the post. A lot of my GR friends make rating seem simple and others seem to have these iron-clad systems. My own seems hopelessly slapdash and whimsical and arbitrary. I’ve tried to go with the simple measure “how much I enjoyed this” regardless of anything else, but even there I know it’s often tied up with my mood while I’m reading–I read this book on the beach so I loved it. I was arguing with my son about the X-box that day and I wanted to pitch this book out the window. The first seven M/M werewolf books I ever read got much higher ratings than they deserve–is that really fair. On reflection I decided I don’t like this book as much as I thought I did–do I go back and change the rating? Half the days my solution is a big “whatever—ratings are meaningless–just give it four stars.” My only consolation is that mine is just a reader review–hopefully one of many–so that prospective readers will get a general sense of how much people liked the book. And I spend a lot of time and thought on the reviews themselves as opposed to the ratings.
Yes, the four-star solution is one I often go for. If I’m ‘three stars’ while actually reading a book I frequently just abandon it.
I rate completely on gut feeling when I finish the book. I loved it, I liked it, It was okay, I didn’t like it, I hated it. That’s why a classic can get a lower rating than a contemporary romance. I’m just reading for escapism.
So true. I have given Magpie Lord books 5 stars and Kafka 5 stars too on Goodreads, am I saying you write like classic Kafka? Er..no…sorry! Point is I rate the books according to MY personal taste and enjoyment and it is totally subjective and I am neither a) professional critic or b) a literary critic. I don’t write reviews myself and have only ever done it a couple of times, once when I was enraged by a MC from a personal, kind of moral!, point of view and to be honest it was to vent my difficult feelings provoked by reading the book but I was honest about the fact that I could see the writer was a good writer (and indeed her being a good writer is probably why I had such a strong reaction) and made my reasons for a 1 star review clear. But still that 1 star is there to haunt me because another part of me thinks people see the star rating first and foremost on Amazon and how fair is that? So no more reviewing for me!! It’s too simplistic and it’s easy to manipulate that’s what I don’t like about star rating.
(This would be a brilliant opportunity for me to throw an Anne Rice style snit. ‘What do you mean, I’m not up there with Kafka? MY FEELINGS!!!’)
But yes, quite. Objectivity is impossible, and especially with such a blunt-instrument system. But the reviews and stars make a gigantic difference to authors, and to other readers, so as a reader with an author’s perspective, I feel compelled to keep doing it, even though I’d rather not. I suppose we can only try to be fair within our subjective responses….
I thought you’d written a new book called Stars & Tripe – sounded like a strange name but the “review” was so good I wanted to grab it!
The way I look at it, there aren’t that many 5 star books out there… well, what I consider 5 star books For me the difference between 4 and 5 stars is the difference between great and excellent; the difference between a really satisfying read and something that has left an indelible mark on me. When I see an author or a reviewer or a blogger of thoughts about a book continually give out 5 stars, I wonder what their standards are that so many books reach excellence. Also, when it’s an author giving out a ton of 5 star ratings, I admit to thinking that it’s either a quid pro quo situation or the author is afraid that if they review honestly it might cause strife within the author community and their own works will suffer unfair ratings.
As for reviewing, well, I don’t review. I give my thoughts on the books I read, how they made me feel, if I enjoyed the read, if there were things that bugged me, would I recommend etc… I’m not a professional critic. So if you read my thoughts on Booklikes, what you’re getting is how I felt about the book, without in depth dissection and examination of the author’s motives and so on.
I think we give excellence far too easily these days. When I do customer surveys, I very seldom rate the service/product at the very top of the scale. Not that many things are perfectly perfect and I feel that if we rate them so, then the creator/producer of said item/service will cease to strive to do better. And to put the cherry on the sundae, I’m beginning to find that authors and publishing companies asking me to review and rate their products on social media platforms to be rather tacky. I guess I liked to think they were above all that. 🙂 Ah well.
I really agree about the five stars problem–It’s something I want to fix about my own reviewing–to be much more sparing with the top rating.