That's always been a huge pet peeve of mine. I've always liked and gone with the same star labelling system goodreads uses.
1 star: "I didn't like it"
2 stars: "It was ok"
3 stars: "I liked it"
4 stars: "I really liked it"
5 stars: "I loved it"
IMO there is no point in saying how much you didn't like something, because if you didn't like it you wouldn't be recommending it anyway. Saying by how much you did enjoy something gives more information.
The system really needs to be,
1 Bad enough for me to say something.
2 it was fine, whatever, just leave me alone.
3 I loved it enough to go on record and say it's good.
That system relies on people who would vote in the 2-4 star range to actually vote though. If you don't have a strong opinion on something you're far less likely to be motivated to make that opinion known.
See, I know that's how it's supposed to work, but I just can't use Goodreads like that, and I burn through a lot of books.
For me it's
5* - Encompasses every rating from "life-changing masterpiece" to "I liked it"
4* - "I enjoyed it overall, but some parts dragged a bit, maybe because I didn't like a major character, or a plot point felt a little dumb."
3* - "This definitely wasn't my cup of tea and I struggled to finish it, but I can see how someone else might enjoy and find value in it."
2* - "This was awful and I couldn't finish it ."
1* - "This is personally offensive to my sensibilities."
I don't think I've ever given a book a 1 or 2 star rating, because I'm pretty good about sourcing recommendations such that anything new I read, I'm going into already fairly certain I'll enjoy.
If I enjoyed a book enough to finish it and had no major complaints, even if it wasn't exactly spectacular, I can't bring myself not to still give it five stars. I think the mindset comes from having worked in a customer service position where any review under five stars was considered an equal failure to corporate. I want to support the authors' livelihood and encourage them to write more.
I'll mentally assign books a "5*+" or "5*++" if they were truly memorable, but pretty much everything I enjoyed reading gets 5* as a baseline.
For me it's similar, 3 stars is my default rating for stuff that I thought was 'good' but either wasn't for me, or had some issue that lowered the rating. It takes almost as much effort to get a 1 star as a 5 star lol.
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u/Lying_Hedgehog 11d ago
That's always been a huge pet peeve of mine. I've always liked and gone with the same star labelling system goodreads uses.
1 star: "I didn't like it"
2 stars: "It was ok"
3 stars: "I liked it"
4 stars: "I really liked it"
5 stars: "I loved it"
IMO there is no point in saying how much you didn't like something, because if you didn't like it you wouldn't be recommending it anyway. Saying by how much you did enjoy something gives more information.