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Book Review Confusion in Picking a New Novel Based on Goodreads Ratings


Garlan the Gallant

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Hi,

I am trying to select the next novel that I want to read. I decided to look at the Goodreads ratings to help narrow my short list of the potential novels down to the one I would choose next. I think that the point of Goodreads is to potentially help you select your next novel based on reviews. The site posts the average review for novels and how many people have rated that novel. My list is as follows:

Wool by Hugh Howie

Goodreads: 4.41 avg, 15,765 ratings

Deathless by Catherynne M Valente

Goodreads: 4.18 avg, 1,958 ratings

Heaven’s Net is Wide by Lian Hearn

Goodreads: 4.12 avg, 2887 ratings

The White-Luck Warrior by R. Scott Bakker

Goodreads: 4.09 avg, 965 ratings

Woken Furies by Richard K. Morgan

Goodreads: 4.07 avg, 6,482 ratings

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Goodreads: 3.99 avg, 142,408 ratings

The Passage by Justin Cronin

Goodreads: 3.99 avg, 63,723 ratings

Among Thieves by Douglas Hulick

Goodreads: 3.92 avg, 2,829 ratings

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

Goodreads: 3.82 avg, 4,037 ratings

WWW: Wake by Robert J Sawyer

Goodreads: 3.79 avg 3,277 ratings

The Electric Church by Jeff Somers

Goodreads: 3.76 avg, 1,285 ratings

Halting State by Charles Stross

Goodreads: 3.75 avg, 4,784 reviews

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

Goodreads: 3.72 avg, 19,285 ratings

The Alchemist of Souls by Anne Lyle

Goodreads: 3.62 avg, 450 ratings

God’s War by Kameron Hurley

Goodreads: 3.6 avg, 997 ratings

Year Zero by Rob Reid

Goodreads: 3.55 avg, 2,350 ratings

Acacia by David Anthony Durham

Goodreads: 3.52 avg, 3,559 ratings

The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan

Goodreads: 3.48 avg, 7,126 ratings

The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington

Goodreads: 3.48 avg, 804 ratings

I'm not much of a math wiz, but I do know that the average review is probably more reliable if there are more ratings. For example, the rating for the Last Werewolf is more likely more reliable than the The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart because it has 7,126 ratings rather than only 804. Is there some type of method I could use to determine some sort of weighted method that would indicate which book on this list is the "best reviewed"? I would prefer a method that wouldn't automatically put the novel with the most reviews first just because it has the most reviews. Additionally, I'm no math wiz...so if it involves some crazy math...that probably won't end up working out either. Please let me know. Thanks!

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No. We've tried to figure out GR's ratings biases a couple of times, and I don't think we've ever arrived at a conclusive solution as to why The Way of Kings is one of the best reviewed books on GR, for example. (The thorn in my personal side on this issue.)

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Using ratings by self-selected voters as an indicator of quality will always be fraught with problems. Look for example at the Modern Library's Readers List of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century. Ayn Rand's books occupy four of the top 10 places in the list, including the top two, with a further 3 of the top 10 slots going to books by L Ron Hubbard.

You probably have a good sense of which books in your list appeal to you the most. Trust your gut instincts; read those ones first.

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I don't take too much notice of ratings averages except in the broadest sense: something with a close-to-3 average has obviously had a lot of bad responses, and something with a mid-4 average clearly is well-liked, but there can be all sorts of reasons for that. The reviews are a better guide. If you read some 2* and 3* reviews that say clearly what they didn't like about the book, it'll give you a good idea of whether it will fit with your personal preferences or not. Then try the sample from Amazon to see if you like the writing style. That's what works for me.

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Agree with Pauline here, skim read some of the reviews good and bad and see what highlights/complaints people have about the books. That will provide more context for the GR rating.

In fact, GR reviews are often highly amusing to me so I actively look forward to checking them out when I finish a book and log it on there. For example, some of the reviews of TWD which complain about killing off characters (in a SURVIVAL HORROR series) are hilarious. Oh, I'm not reading any more because too many people are dying in the zombie apocalypse. :)

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read some 2* and 3* reviews that say clearly what they didn't like about the book, it'll give you a good idea of whether it will fit with your personal preferences or not.

that's the way to do it. i always read one star reviews first, real ones, not the one-liners.

a lengthy negative review will often lay out the issues better than a lengthy positive review, which tend mostly to be book reports--summary, which is widely available elsewhere, plus a coda about how the book is awesome and therefore i am awesome for liking it.

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I don't take too much notice of ratings averages except in the broadest sense: something with a close-to-3 average has obviously had a lot of bad responses, and something with a mid-4 average clearly is well-liked, but there can be all sorts of reasons for that.

I agree that the average rating is only useful as a rough guide. It's maybe not entirely worthless, out of the 220 books I've read which have an average rating >= 4 I've only ranked four of them with a 'bad' rating (Harry Potter and Philosopher's Stone and three Robert Salvatore books). There are 67 books I've read with an average rating worse than 3.5, out of which I've given 34 a bad review (along with quite a few books I did like). However, I don't think it's useful for any more than a vague indication of whether people tended to like the book, if you start comparing the ratings of individual books then there are clearly oddities. The second and third highest average ratings out of books I've read are for A Memory of Light and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which were two books which have had a mixed response even for fans of those series, and I'd doubt you'd find many Jordan or Rowling fans saying that they're the best in the series.

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The problem with Goodreads ratings are that good and bad books alike tend to fall in the 3.5-4.3 range on the ratings scale and it's exceedingly rare to encounter a book with a rating less than 3. The lowest rated Sword of Truth book by Terry Goodkind appears to be a 3.62 though I can't think of a more universally shat upon fantasy series (at least here on these boards).

While I think they'd be a bit better off adopting a 10-star rating system much like IMDB, for some reason Goodreads in particular seems especially vulnerable to artificial inflation/deflation by subjective interest groups -- Libertarians, Christians (particularly Mormons), Young Adult readers and Romance readers among the ones I've most commonly observed.

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It's funny that the ratings are so high, because with a rating system of:

  1. Did not like it
  2. It was ok
  3. Liked it
  4. Really liked it
  5. It was amazing

I would actually expect the average to be lower than on other sites.

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It's funny that the ratings are so high, because with a rating system of:

  1. Did not like it

  2. It was ok

  3. Liked it

  4. Really liked it

  5. It was amazing

I would actually expect the average to be lower than on other sites.

Ya but there is a pattern of people joining.

1. Join Goodreads.

2. Rank all your favorites 5 stars.

3. Either stay and watch your rankings slowly even out OR get bored and leave, forever inflating certain books.

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I don't think I've ever used Goodreads aggregate user ratings to decide whether or not to read a book, though I'm often curious after I read one to see how much I line up with the taste of the public. I'm puzzled when I give three stars to a book with a 4.5+ rating (seriously, The Way of Kings, WTF?), five stars to a book with a sub-4 rating, and all that kind of stuff. But there are great books with OK ratings, great books with high ratings, OK books with high ratings, OK books with OK ratings...

Goodreads users are very generous, so I think you can learn more about what books to avoid if they dip below, say, the 3.50 mark.

However, even then, if you use that as a hard and fast rule, you're doing yourself a disservice because you'd then miss books like The Magicians by Lev Grossman, which, while not the best book you will ever read, is worth reading. Or then there's a book like Things Fall Apart which is probably dragged down by the "low ratings from people who read it in school and hated it" crowd (with a 3.52 rating, it's towards the bottom in that regard) - but is also good. Dipping back into the SF/F genre, the first book of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt series has a lowly 3.57 rating, and yet for me, that series is not to be missed.

I will neither be the first nor the last to make the suggestion of reading some of the reviews of people who seem like they know what they're talking about.

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I see the White Luck Warrior on your list as well. I am even more hesitant than normal to give later installments in a series much credence at all. If you made it to book 5 of Bakker, chances are you like his PoN books (I know there are exceptions to this i.e. WoT). Comparing the ratings within that series would make mores sense to me.

I agree with the earlier posters. I usually read the 2-4 star reviews more than the high or low.

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I see the White Luck Warrior on your list as well. I am even more hesitant than normal to give later installments in a series much credence at all. If you made it to book 5 of Bakker, chances are you like his PoN books (I know there are exceptions to this i.e. WoT). Comparing the ratings within that series would make mores sense to me.

I agree with the earlier posters. I usually read the 2-4 star reviews more than the high or low.

I read the Judging Eye right when it came out. I never got around to reading the White Luck Warrior. Well, I tried once but there was so much I had forgotten that it was hard to get back into. I wish there was a good plot synopsis of Bakker's books (like they have at Tower of the Hand for aSoIaF) because I don't really re-read novels.

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But Bakker’s books include plot synopses themselves.

(And given the levels of WTF, sometimes the synopses are the only way of understand what was actually going on in the text!)

White Luck is the best SSF book I’ve read in a very long time. Jump right in. (The board’s Bakker followers are happy to help in case you have questions.)

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The problem with Goodreads ratings are that good and bad books alike tend to fall in the 3.5-4.3 range on the ratings scale and it's exceedingly rare to encounter a book with a rating less than 3. The lowest rated Sword of Truth book by Terry Goodkind appears to be a 3.62 though I can't think of a more universally shat upon fantasy series (at least here on these boards).

While I think they'd be a bit better off adopting a 10-star rating system much like IMDB, for some reason Goodreads in particular seems especially vulnerable to artificial inflation/deflation by subjective interest groups -- Libertarians, Christians (particularly Mormons), Young Adult readers and Romance readers among the ones I've most commonly observed.

I'm not surprised. Readers tend to read books they think they are going to like rather than to select their reading through a lucky dip (although with 'political' books you see people reading something they disagree with, or even post a review and a rating without having read the book). Going to the cinema or watching a film with friends you're more likely to get roped into watching something you might not have chosen yourself.

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I would think this a poor way of choosing a read.

1* reviews drag averages down very rapidly. If a book is at all polarising it will not score highly.

Book 2's very often (almost always in fact) score higher because they are read by people who liked book 1. Author X's sixth book (even if it's the 6th stand alone rather than part of a series) will do pretty well score-wise because it will overwhelmingly be read by people who know that author and like their style.

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