Read With Us Lounge: 6/15/26

I've been forced to change my comment settings because I was inundated with stupid spam. Currently it's set for users with Google accounts. I'm sorry to do this and don't mean to make things more cumbersome for my valued readers as I do appreciate your comments. I also chose to moderate all comments, so please submit your comments (just once!) and they will be visible after I moderate and publish them. Sorry and thank you! Now, back to the much more relaxing Read With Us Lounge.

Today in the Read With Us Lounge I'm wondering if star ratings help or flatten the reading experience? Can a deeply meaningful book still be just 3 stars?

If you've spent any time on Goodreads, StoryGraph, or Bookstagram, you've probably noticed that star ratings have become one of the dominant ways we talk about books. Before we know anything about a novel's themes, characters, or emotional impact, we often know whether someone gave it two stars or five.

But what do those stars actually tell us?

Star ratings are useful. They offer a quick shorthand for our reactions and help us keep track of what we've read. They can guide recommendations and make it easier to spot patterns in our own reading lives. Looking back at a year's worth of books, a rating system can reveal surprising things about our tastes.

But I think star ratings can also flatten the reading experience. A single number has to carry the weight of hundreds of pages, dozens of emotions, and countless personal connections. The result is that books with very different strengths and weaknesses often end up receiving the same score.

Think about two books you rated three stars. One may have been a perfectly competent novel that entertained you for a weekend and was forgotten a month later. I would choose On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan for this example. Lovely prose but not much else for me. The other may have been a challenging, flawed, but unforgettable work that raised difficult questions and stayed in your mind for a long time. This one for me is Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande. I probably think about this book at least six or eight times a year. My star ratings are identical, but my experiences were not.

This raises an interesting question for me: Can a deeply meaningful book still be just three stars?

I would answer yes.

We often assume that ratings measure importance, but they may actually measure enjoyment, or some combination of enjoyment, craft, originality, emotional impact, and personal timing. A book can be significant without being entirely successful. It can provoke thought without being pleasurable. It can change the way we see the world while also frustrating us as readers.

Some of the books that generate the best discussions fall into this category. They may have pacing issues, unlikeable characters, or uneven writing, yet they tackle subjects that linger long after the final page. We may admire them more than we enjoy them. We may be grateful we read them even if we would hesitate to recommend them broadly.

In book groups especially, the most interesting conversations often emerge from books that land somewhere in the middle. A universally beloved five-star read can generate enthusiastic agreement, but a three-star book can produce debate. Kym, Carole, and I have purposefully not chosen some books that we thought everyone would love (e.g. Tom Lake) because we were afraid there would be little discussion and we would all just sit around saying how much we enjoyed the book. Readers bring different experiences, values, and expectations, revealing just how subjective reading can be.

Perhaps the real limitation of star ratings is not that they exist, but that they sometimes become the entire conversation. I have long wished that Goodreads would allow for the awarding of half stars, but even that wouldn't really solve the star issue. When we focus too much on assigning a number, we risk overlooking the richer questions: Why did this book affect me? What challenged me? What frustrated me? What will I remember a year from now?

A star rating can capture a verdict, but it rarely captures the whole picture. Maybe I should stop depending on them so much! 

Things to think about:

• What factors influence your star ratings most: enjoyment, literary quality, emotional impact, originality, something else, or all of them together?

• Have you ever given three stars to a book that you still think about years later?

• Is there a difference between a "good" book and an "important" book?

• Do you rate books based on your personal experience or on what you believe the author achieved?

• Have star ratings changed the way you choose books or talk about them with other readers?

• If you had to give up either written reviews or star ratings, which would you keep?

Be sure and check with Kym and Carole to see what they're thinking about today!