I occasionally rate books, but, honestly, I should probably stop rating, because if I find the book interesting, it’s going to be 4 or 5 stars, and I am pretty good about reading books I find interesting, so everything ends up being 4 or 5 stars. Meaning that my ratings are fairly useless.
Looking at the specific books I rated, I think a big reason I actually ended up rating them was that there was either 0 or 1 other rating. So by putting 4 or 5 stars, I was sort of saying, “If you’re looking at this book’s page to try and decide whether or not to read it, I think it’s fine to spend your time reading this book”.
I never write reviews because of the need to assign a star rating. I’m not really sure why this is, but, to some extent, I think it frames my writing on a text in a strange way. Like when I’ve tried to write a review for one of the few books I’ve rated, I always end up deleting it because what I’ve written feels unrelated to the stars and unhelpful to the potential reader.
I think in writing this, the core of my issue is that there is a sort of “product review” feeling when I see star ratings. Like the book is a bulky vacuum that has trouble getting corners and going up stairs and I should know this before purchasing (I suppose there is a parallel here with a book that is in desperate need of an editor). I would really like a “Thoughts on the book” option where you can just write some text without assigning a star rating and have that posted on the book’s main page.
