About five years ago, I got fed up with Goodreads and decided that I could just build my own replacement. That turned out to be shockingly easy - the /reading section of my site runs on Jekyll and is free to maintain. For a long time I basically just maintained this as a minimalist equivalent of what I’d had on Goodreads - date that I finished reading the book, rating, nice little cover art images - and called it a day. But there turned out to be a semi-unexpected benefit of this migration, not just de-coupling from the janky and under-supported interface that Goodreads was sporting (and from Amazon), but the ability to keep tweaking and playing with it to meet my needs.

One of the really big things I added was backlinks. Being able to take a moment after I’ve finished a book, and reflect on what other books it brought to mind personally, is lovely in itself. But it also adds a really cool dimensionality to the site where I can wander through the books associatively rather than just by author or chronologically, etc. It mirrors the experience of wandering the stacks of a library or my personal bookcase, making associative and sometimes surprising connections. It brings the site to life in a way that is analogous to the social features of Goodreads, but is much richer to my individual experience of reading.

Now then. The  most recent significant change I’ve made recently is just straight up removing the 1-5 star ratings system that I carried forward directly from Goodreads when initially setting up the site. Kind of like backlinks, it can be fun to take a moment and assess how much I liked a book. And there’s a kind of lovely tension in having to take the rich experience of a novel, or a big slog of a history book, and boil down the whole experience of it to a single digit. And it’s also neat (and sometimes pretty embarrassing) to see how I rated books 10 or more years ago, versus what I might think of them today. But.

Increasingly, assigning 1-5 ratings to books hasn’t really sat well with me, for a few reasons:

  • It’s less and less clear what a 5 star (or 1 star) rating means. Am I saying that I recommend others read it? That I personally had fun reading it? That it was worth the time and effort? That I respect it? The exercise in assigning a rating has become less meaningful to me over time, and I feel myself tossing off ratings without any real insight or reflection. As a result, it’s junk data.

  • Increasingly, I have the really cool experience of reading books by people I know, or might plausibly get to know. It feels pretty bad to rate a friend or colleague’s book anything less than 100 out of 5 stars! So there’s either an incentive toward grade inflation or to simply not rate the book at all. Or to pull down the public version of the site.

  • By extension, I found myself thinking about all the (living) authors I don’t know, and how terrible it must feel to have your work summarily judged according to such a reductive rubric. Not that folks are really visiting this site much (I assume), but getting into this headspace made me feel a bit icky in the moment of assigning ratings. Which is sort of the opposite of the spirit of the endeavor. Keeping this list should be fun and rewarding.

  • This is the big one: It also seems fundamentally disrespectful of the art itself. And this is what ultimately got me. Although it’s a bit hard to articulate, I began to feel that the 1 to 5 or 1 to x rating system must historically be about commoditizing art (or hotels, or restaurants), which is great for earbuds or, idk, canned soup, but sort of obscene to do to a book by Zadie Smith or Hannah Arendt. Around 2003, I had to actually read the entire Old Testament end to end for a class. It’s a nice thing in my life that this is before I started rating books.

So status quo is that the ratings don’t appear. I still have the data and am rating books out of force of habit. But I’ve been ruminating on a better and more interesting, non-reductive approach. Maybe using something weird like the 5 factor psychology model? Or kipe from DnD character traits? Or PESTLE analysis? I’m not sure. But I want it to be weird, generative, and to feel like I’m in dialog with the work, not putting it in a box.

As a jumping off point, here is the super interesting Wikipedia page on the history of star ratings. Notable that they emerged in 1820 to facilitate young aristocrats making the Grand Tour. This fits well with my feeling that there is a deep tie to power, commoditization and the mass market. Also notable because this is around the time that mass marketed novels really took off!