Goodreads was wrong… Book Tag!

I have been wanting to get involved with book tag prompts for quite a while and, since I had a bank holiday weekend, when I saw Zezee do this Goodreads Was Wrong one it seemed like a fun and simple way to start!

I would like to do more of these, I might try for one a month.

I’ve used Goodreads for a very long time (since 2010 I think!)! A lot longer than the two years I’ve been writing book reviews for this blog. There are a lot of books I’ve forgotten entirely, so it was fun to take a trip back through everything I’ve read. I’ve gone through phases of writing reviews for Goodreads, so I have not always have left myself any information about why I rated a book the way I did!¹

What is the highest-rated book that you gave a low rating?

Sort your books in Goodreads based on Average Ratings and find the highest-rated book you gave a low rating.

The one that jumps out immediately is Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson. GR gives it 4.62 and I gave it only 1 star which means I couldn’t finish it!

This is the third book in The Stormlight Archive series which apparently now has 4 books with a 5th expected. They were also my first and only Brandon Sanderson book. Interestingly I gave the previous two books – The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance both 4 stars – which is unusually high for me reading Fantasy. I assume this was a case of getting either bored or frustrated with where the story was heading but this was in 2018 when I was in a period of not writing book reviews, and since I remember absolutely nothing about these books we’ll never know! All I do remember is I read them on Kindle and I liked the previous ones enough to pay full price for e-books, and that I read two and three on holiday in Penang (one of them while I was sticking waiting for hours in urgent care to get diagnosed with Lyme disease!). If I had enjoyed them enough to do that then something must have gone horribly wrong in book 3 to get 1 star.

What is the lowest-rated book that you gave a high rating?

Sort your books in Goodreads based on Average Ratings, in reverse order, and find the lowest-rated book you gave a high rating.

So this has to be my beloved Bunny by Mona Awad! Apparently the GR average is only 3.5 but I gave it 5 big fat shining stars after reading it twice through and writing a huge blog post about it!

I do understand that this book is definitely not for everyone – it is super weird, dark and sometimes disturbing, and if you try to do a surface read you’ll probably come away confused and frustrated because this is a novel that gives you no answers, and leaves it for the reader to decide what they think is happening. So while I love it so fucking much, and I credit it with reigniting my love for literature, and opening my eyes to the fact there are really exciting contemporary authors for me, I also understand why it is divisive!

I just hope a 3.5 rating doesn’t influence Mona Awards future projects because I love her weird warped world!

What is the most popular book that you disagree with the average rating?

Sort your books in Goodreads based on Number of Ratings and find the first book you disagree with the average rating.

So there are plenty of examples of genre classics that don’t jive with me – like The Hobbit has 4 million ratings with an average of 4.29 and I gave it 2 stars, or Dune which has 1.4 million with an average of 4.27 and I also gave it 2 stars (which is generous, I hated Dune!) – but I can see the merits of those so I don’t disagree. I’m going to interpret “popular” as the kind of shit that tops the GR polls (and social media) that have me convinced everyone read entirely different books… but now I also stay well away from those books, so I just have two examples of ones I did try to read that convinced me to avoid!

Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas has 1.7 million ratings with an average of 4.18 and I gave it 2 stars. Honestly I feel like I can’t move on book-based social media for Sarah J. Maas so I’m shocked by the fact it is only 1.7 million ratings but checking out the others it seems like this is one of the less popular ones (A Court of Thorns and Roses has way more)!

I read this in 2016 while I was a school librarian and I literally spent all day reading Young Adult novels, and I also had time to write book reviews, so thankfully I have access to the thoughts of Alice of 8 years ago! I was very disappointed to find the cool premise of a bad ass teenage assassin turned into 90% love triangle and descriptions of pretty dresses. I hated the main character, in general characterisation was not there and any action was told in summary after the fact! I also did not get on with the writing, SJM is not for me… And social media please stop recommending me Romantasy.

I am sneaking in another, one I’ve not thought about in years, The Selection by Kiera Cass which is so bad it almost circles back around to enjoyable. This one has 1.6 million ratings with an average of 4.08 stars and I gave it 2. I now realise the similarities to Throne of Glass in that it is also 90% pretty dresses and thinking about boys but at least that’s clear from the cover! This is one where not only is the plot offensively bad but the writing is too – it’s almost a parody. I mean the main character is called America Singer and she’s good at singing, so… yeah. I really don’t understand why this was ever so popular, and the brains of teenage girls should be protected from this rot.

What is the least popular book that you disagree with the average rating?

Sort your books in Goodreads based on Number of Ratings, in reverse order, and find the first book you disagree with the average rating

It took a lot of scrolling to find this – a lot of comic books and less known YA books where I had agreed with the average – but apparently the big outlier is that I really hated Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Volume 4! GR gave it an average of 3.99 from 1,215 ratings and I gave it 1 star!

I had actually forgotten about these comics, I had a friend that had them all in hardback and would lend them to me. They were meant to be a continuation of the Buffy story after the TV series ended and it started off good but then flew off the rails. I wrote in 2016 “This was bad. So bad it sort of tarnishes the previously pretty awesome stuff that came before!” I did give the three previous volumes 4 stars!

So specifically I note that I hated Buffy getting OP superpowers like flight(!!), nonsensical resolutions to the story arc, a disturbing Dawn and Xander romance, overdone sex scenes and apparently they’d ruined Angel as a character in some way. So if you are interested in these read to the library binding volume 3 but no further!

Choose two three books that have an average rating of 3/5 stars but you gave a higher rating.

I have to mention of love Mona Awad again and All’s Well which has an average of 3.75 and I gave it 5 stars! Once again I read it twice through and wrote a big long blog post dissecting it! This was my second Awad and again I thought it was fantastic, but again it is dark and very weird and needs a closer read to truly appreciate it , so it is not for everyone. I thought the depiction of chronic pain in particular was very powerful, and it was clear that that came from the author’s own experience.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata is a quick read but it blew me away when I read it in 2022 (pre-blog!). This was just so different to anything else I’d been reading, and it also reminded me a little of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine which is another favourite of mine. It is a small, short story that focuses on Keiko a perfectly content Japanese convenience store worker in her 30s whose life choices do not line up with what society wants from her. Keiko has a very analytical, neutral point of view that often made me laugh and I really appreciated the ending!

I am going to sneak in a third, because I want to talk about this one aswell! – Idol by Louise O’Neill has an average of 3.58 and I gave it 4 stars. I read this last year (blog review here) and I really loved it, not quite a 5 starts but a high 4. It is a challenging one though, it deals with rape and coercive control told from the point of view of the accused who is a very manipulative unreliable narrator (and social media lifestyle guru). Louise O’Neill is very skilled and writing this kind of emotionally complex story (she also wrote Asking For It), and I was very impressed with this.

Choose two books that have an average rating of 3/5 stars but you gave a lower rating.

There are a lot of books for this category – so many I’d completely forgotten about – but I picked two of the more interesting ones to talk about.

I’m picking this one because I keep seeing it everywhere and it is so crap! How To Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie was the last book I ever bought that was the result of social media hype where I didn’t check on who the author is before purchasing. She’s well connected – the daughter of a former editor-in-chief, former journalist herself, runs in the kind of circles where she is now married to a well know radio presenter, and her book got hyped by all the usual industry gang who promote their mate’s mediocre books (Dolly Alderton etc). This book is so disappointing, I couldn’t get through it and gave it 1 star, because it reads like it was written by a teenager – it’s shallow without any nuance and it made me cringe too many times in the first 15%.

I just checked my shelves and I did finally get rid of my copy of this one! Welcome to Night Vale and Jospeh Fink and Jeffrey Cranor has an average of 3.83 and I gave it 1 star. So this was a novel spun out of the very popular fictional podcast, that I used to love circa 2016-17 (I even went to a live show, I have a t-shirt and a tote bag) and I think this book actually grew me out of the podcast it was so bad! It was boring and instantly forgettable, and made me realise how shallow the podcast was under it’s weird veneer. It’s fine in a short podcast to have characters apathetic to the strange happenings around them, but it does not work in 400 pages of novel.

Choose two books that have an average rating of 4/5 stars but you gave a lower rating.

OK, so Hoofin’ It by R.J. Blain has 2,741 ratings and an average for 4.29! And it is legitimately one of the worst books I have every read. This is by best argument for a Goodreads average rating being just objectively wrong! The plot is offensively bad (sex trafficking played for laughs in a romantic comedy), the characters are terrible and the rewriting is so mind-numbingly repetitive it blew my mind that an author could get away with it. I do not know why it is getting rated so highly. I can only think that this is such a niche genre book that the audience just has standards in the gutter?

I made the mistake of reading it because it was only 99p and the cover a premise sounded like they would be a laugh… but I couldn’t have been more wrong. It made me angry. I DNF’d it. I’m still annoyed about it now! I have a review/rant on the blog.

Then for one that is significantly more popular is The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. This has almost 1.6 million ratings with an average of 4.32 stars …and I don’t get it. Everyone else definitely read something different. I hated this, I couldn’t finished it. It was so dull, the prose sent me to sleep and the characters were whiney. Worst of all this is billed as a modern retelling of a romance between two Greek Heroes but nothing about their relationship rings true to me for two gay men. It smacks of written by a heterosexual woman because you could swap Patroclus for a woman and nothing would change.

I was also underwhelmed by Circe, though I did finish that one, so I really don’t vibe with Madeline Miller.

That said, The Song of Achilles is still leagues better than Hoofin’ It, so I apologise for including it in the same category!

Do you tend to agree or disagree with Goodreads average rating, and do you use Goodreads as a guide for books you want to read?

There was one more question in the set – Choose two books that have an average rating of 2/5 stars but you gave a higher rating – but I don’t read books that have average 2 star ratings exactly because I use GR as a guide before I pick up any new book.

Life is too short to read boring books so I make a real effort to research everything I’m interested in reading to see if it’s likely to meet my tastes. I will use the average as a general guide and anything below a mid 3 is usually a straight no but I’ll factor in how interested I am, the number of ratings, and scan down to get an idea of the quality of reviews.

When reading reviews I go for the 3 stars ones first because those people are mostly likely to balance their thoughts with positives and negatives, this is why I think it is important to review books I didn’t enjoy as well as those I did. I also might read a few reviews on either end of the spectrum. I always look for ones that are at least a paragraph of thoughts.

Over time I’ve also recognised other GR users who have similar taste to me so that helps too! 

Most of the time, for the books I choose to read, I’m in the same ball park as the average. There are a lot of outliers though – for a recent example I hated Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow while everyone else seems to love it (I think I edged it to 3 stars because some of it was good, but it’s more like a 2.5 with hindsight). Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell is another one!

But, I’ve learned to think twice about books with people in their 20s, and anything with flowery language.. and avoid any retellings of Greek myths!

Now fellow book bloggers…