My Problems With Star Ratings

Consider this more of ramble than a rant, but definitely more of a rant than a review.

This’ll just be a short return to a topic Sam and I both visited here when we first started this blog.

Basically, before I started this blog, I decided I didn’t want to use star ratings. Given the name, I am an indecisive person, so giving books an arbitrary number, based on how much I enjoyed them in the one moment when I posted the review, just didn’t compute to me.

At the very least, I wanted to do 10 instead of 5 because I think it’s easier to choose a number when you’ve got options, rather than being constantly stuck between two.

What I really wanted to, though, was scrap the idea of numbers completely and just have a sentence I could just point at and have it encompass all my thoughts in only that.

It turns out that neither Sam nor myself were witty to come up with 5 summary sentences, let alone 10. Or maybe we just couldn’t decide on 5 between us because we had different ideas of what each would mean. Hence, we reverted back to the basic 5 star rating.

Don’t get me wrong, I can definitely see the merits of using a star system to rate books. At the very least, it’s universal. Every website/shop/advert for every type of product out there uses this system. And I could not understand the language the review was written in, but I could see 5 stars and know it was worth looking into. That’s another thing, I don’t need to read a review if I just see someone’s star rating.

Unfortunately, my positives for using a star rating system end there. I have many more things I dislike about it.

The first is something I’ve sort of already mentioned. You see someone’s star rating and think you don’t have to look any further into it. Oh, 2 stars? You didn’t like it. 5 stars? A book without faults! A lot of the time, reviews are a lot more nuanced than that and star ratings just aren’t. They seem very final.

Which brings me to my next point. I really don’t like 3 stars. I think 3 stars is a weird no man’s land between like and dislike. To me, 3 stars means you liked it, but didn’t love it and won’t necessarily remember it in a couple of months. I am always quite hesitant to read a book with an average star rating of about 3 stars because, to me, that means it’s going to be pretty mediocre and I just don’t know if I want to read a book like that. However, I think 3 star reviews are some of the best to read because the author of them have weighed up the good and bad to create a more balanced review.

I always feel hesitant about giving books 3 stars. I’d actually like there to be another star between 3 and 4, for the books I’ve generally given 3.5. I think, for me, there’s another no man’s land between these two ratings, where I liked it, but didn’t love it, but will still be pursuing other books in that series/by that author.

I think I especially want this other rating when it’s a book that a lot of other people like, so you feel like you’ll get judged for giving said book 3 stars. 3 stars isn’t bad to me but, if you don’t follow that up with a review that explains this, it’s easy to quickly conclude that you didn’t like it.

Likewise, with authors – is 3 stars bad to them or are they happy to get a 3 star review? I don’t generally tag them in 3 star reviews because, at an immediate glance, 3 stars doesn’t look great, but maybe some will be happy to get those reviews. Who knows.

Bryony’s rating: ⭐⭐

I can see the benefit of it, but it’s just not for me. I’ll continue to use it in the meantime, but I wish there was a universally acknowledged second option.

Until next time!

An addendum from Sam. A Samdendum.

My feelings on star ratings are very similar to B’s. To put it in a pithy sentence (which is what star ratings try to do to reviews, how meta!) it’s silly to try and boil down a complex, subjective opinion into a single integer.

I’d happily do away with them on this blog, but I don’t know how y’all feel about that. I’d be interested to know though. What is your opinion on star ratings, dear reader? Would you be disgruntled if we (I) didn’t bother with them?