Emotions run high on Goodreads. In fact, I tell every author navigating their first book launch to stay off it. They’re not going to listen to me, because who doesn’t want to know whether their manuscript – this precious thing they’ve toiled on in solitude for years – has found its readers? And because I’ve been there myself, I anticipate the spiral that follows. The elated high upon reading the first glowing review. The world-ending devastation of the first scathing review (or even the first lukewarm four-star review). The righteous indignation at the first three-star review. No one understands me. Are these people even literate? Am I even literate? It’s all too much; it doesn’t make you a better writer. Block the site and focus on your work.
Though I find I can’t stay off Goodreads myself. I don’t read reviews of my own work – I have finally reached that improbable, lucky place where I’m no longer very curious about what anyone is saying about me, so long as I get to keep writing. But I love to ramble on about novels I loved, and I love to see what my friends are loving. And when I’m struggling with negative feedback, I find it helpful to reflect on what sorts of reviews compel me to pick up books. It’s rarely about the Goodreads number – 3.2, 4.5, it doesn’t matter. I don’t choose books based on the aggregate rating as if they are skincare products – it’s got at least a four, so it must be good! I’m not looking for unanimous approval, either. Sometimes I scroll past half a dozen critical reviews and decide to buy a book regardless because of a single sentence consisting of, basically, “Ahhhhhh!”
And sometimes I play a silly game of reading terrible reviews of books I loved, or glowing reviews of books I hated. That nonsense puzzle-box romp I found charming, whimsical, and inventive – it turns out others declared it indecipherable and obnoxious. That fantasy novel I put down after the first 10 pages – I guess I’m vastly outnumbered by the folks who think it’s the second coming of Christ. I like advising debut writers experiencing the Goodreads blues to play this game, as nothing else makes it so clear nothing can really define what makes a “good book”. We just know what strikes a chord in ourselves. Right story, right reader, right time.
I don’t think my Goodreads habits are exceptional. We often choose books against the grain, for whimsy alone, or out of pure contrarian spite. I love shouting with friends over the dinner table about authors they love and I despise, and vice versa. Hanya Yanagihara? Discuss. Sally Rooney? Discuss. Part of the pleasure of reading is learning to articulate what we admire in a text and defending it against other interpretations – not in service of deciding who is right, but in chewing through all the ways, all the different contexts, in which a text can generate meaning. What irks me then are not the blisteringly mean reviews (which can be delightfully inventive) but the unimaginative ones – from readers who could not possibly imagine that a novel distasteful to some might resonate with others, who insist not only that the book and the author have committed a great moral or aesthetic failure, but also that anyone who liked the book is guilty of – well, something. What a boring, sanctimonious way to read.
So why has Goodreads become synonymous in some circles with petty drama? We often toss the words “Goodreads controversy” around as if controversy were something frightening, rather than a sign of a lively, healthy reading culture. But we ought to disagree about books. We ought even to get in heated fights about books! I happily get into shouting matches over Nabokov in person; if I had more hours in the day, I’d do it on the internet, too. I find the worst experiences on Goodreads tend to crop up – as with every other online forum – when reductive, bad-faith arguments are amplified over everything else, when all nuance collapses into a judgment pleasing in its ethical simplicity, and suddenly we’ve all decided to hate a book because a reviewer with a lot of followers said we should. Goodreads doesn’t work when we treat it as a crowdsourced authority, wherein reviewing and liking reviews means voting in a referendum on whether a book has value, and whether its readers are Good, Righteous People.
Which brings us to what has been dubbed “review-bombing” by the New York Times – that is, critical pile-ons that can derail a book before it releases. Frankly, authors have been sighing and shrugging about this for years. It’s unclear whether Goodreads can make any meaningful fixes, or whether they have any incentive to. Authors have limited options – it rarely ends well when authors barge into spaces meant for readers. So the duty is left to readers to think carefully about how we write and engage with reviews. I am certainly a naive idealist here, but I retain this faith we could wrestle with online toxicity by taking our own arguments seriously before we post them. What purpose does our outrage serve? Who benefits if this book tanks? Who is making claims about this book? What passages do they cite? Do we agree with their interpretation? Are those passages represented in good faith, or are they plucked out of context? For that matter, how many people leaving these reviews have actually read the book?
Sometimes the book really is that bad. Sometimes the book has been badly – wilfully, maliciously – misunderstood. More often it’s something in the middle – the novel swings a little too wide, as any ambitious project should, and readers are split on whether it succeeds. Whatever the case, I suggest we think less about aggregate ratings and more about that off-the-cuff, indecipherable, inside-joke-laden review by that random account we only follow because they have the same unlikely favourite novel that we do. Goodreads functions best when we don’t let Goodreads tell us what to read.
• Rebecca F Kuang’s novels include Babel: An Arcane History and Yellowface.
