I've been thinking a lot about ratings for books.
I just gave a romance novel (The Best Man's Problem by Sera Taíno) four stars on Goodreads. Prior to that, the last two books I gave four stars were The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan and Passing by Nella Larson.
These are wildly different books.
The Best Man's Problem is an enemies-to-lovers, opposites attract somewhat spicy mlm romance that I read in about two hours. The Brides of Rollrock Island is a harrowing, folktale-adjacent story about generational trauma. Passing is about the lives of two light-skinned Black women in the 1920s, one of whom lives as a white woman.
Of the three, Passing is probably the one that would get the stamp of being "highbrow". It got an artsy film adaptation and everything. My motivation for reading them was entirely different: I wanted to read Passing out of curiosity, I had heard about the movie and wanted to read the book to educate myself. The Brides of Rollrock Island I read because I love the author's work and I knew it would make me feel melancholy and achy in the best way. The Best Man's Problem I read because I wanted to have a comfortable, easy and enjoyable read in the space of an afternoon.
They all got four stars because they all matched that motivation very well. They didn't change my life (I'm stingy with five stars, sue me), but I enjoyed every one of these books a lot for the purpose I set out to read them.
It just feels really weird to me to rate them all on the same scale, because I'm rating them very subjectively. Did this book give me what I wanted out of it? Yes. Four stars.
I know there are people out there who rate via categories that seem more empirical. And to a degree, I guess that makes sense. But rating craft, like beautiful sentence structure, word choice, dialogue...I mean, I could do all those things, but it would still be subjective. I think The Brides of Rollrock Island is probably the most beautiful of the three in craft terms; someone else might choose something else.
More dangerously, if you read across the board, like me, that leads to a trend towards giving more points to "serious" literature and less to genre fiction. It's no secret people kind of look down on romance as a genre, especially explicit romance, especially especially explicit romance starring lgbtq+ leads of color, all of which is true of the example I'm using. It's "easy" reading, predictable and often formulaic, true, but if that's what you're after, why shouldn't that be worth the same as a more complex book when you're in a different mood?
I don't know that I have a point here, I guess what I'm saying is:
Rating everything we read numerically is not really all that helpful.
Therefore, I have elected radical individualism and rate solely based on the criterion of how happy reading a book made me.
