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I have started looking at Goodreads ratings as a good proxy for well written books but there are a lot of bizarrely high rated pop culture books so it’s not per
by voisin 3y ago
I have started looking at Goodreads ratings as a good proxy for well written books but there are a lot of bizarrely high rated pop culture books so it’s not perfect. Another strategy is to look at books shortlisted for the major awards. That’s how I came across North Woods by Daniel Mason (Pulitzer short list) which is by far the book I enjoyed most this year.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71872930 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71872930
- thfuran 3y ago>I have started looking at Goodreads ratings as a good proxy for well written books Based on my experience looking at Goodreads reviews, I think you'd have just as much luck with a random number generator.
- voisin 3y agoI think it is better for ruling things out rather than shortlisting. A rating below 4.0 is a guaranteed bad read (IMHO) but above 4.0 is not guaranteed of a good read.
- zeroonetwothree 3y agoMany books I've liked have <4.0 on Goodreads. But you're kind of right that I will usually take that as a bad sign that needs to be outweighed by some other reason to read it (like a personal recommendation or whatever).
- tikhonj 3y agoA lot of my absolutely favorite books are rated below 4.0. A few examples: 1. White Noise at 3.86 2. Catch-22 at 3.99 3. Dhalgren at 3.77 4. At Swim-Two-Birds at 3.86 5. Midnight's Children at 3.98 6. Омон Ра at 3.90 7. Never Let Me Go at 3.84 Drawing the line at 4 rules out some of the most interesting books. In my experience, you really have to fall below 3.5 to get consistently bad books, and even then it's not 100% guaranteed.
- hotnfresh 3y agoWoolf’s To the Lighthouse and Orlando are under a 4. But under a 4 is guaranteed bad? LOLWUT. And that’s just the first author I checked. Vonnegut’s Deadeye Dick (less of a crowd pleaser than his handful of biggest books, but certainly not in the bottom tier of his works) is under a 4. The A Man Without a Country collection, which is more of interest as a curiosity than because much of it’s good, is over a 4. Yeah, you may as well flip a coin.
- tarboreus 3y agoAnything assigned in a high school or college English class gets a huge ding, because people who don't want to read it are forced to and, predictably , hate it.
- langsoul-com 3y agoGeneralised rating systems aren't really that great. Given how general they are. Imagine if a book is advanced Sci Fi, as in the concepts are built on exiting and other well known scifi books. The normal reader won't understand and think it's terrible. The actual target audience, Sci Fi book nerds, would love it.
- infecto 3y agoI find it most useful for the similar book recommendations. Just to create an easy to make list that I can then go through to pick out what I want to read.
- cratermoon 3y agoThere was an article on HN recently, "Apex Books of Goodreads" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37970307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37970307, in which the author uses a Pareto frontier to attempt to account for the recency bias. It was not entirely successful, as the result includes four of the Harry Potter series and five Calvin and Hobbes collections, including the highest-rated The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, from 2005, and second is Brandon Sanderson's 2014 novel Words of Radiance (The Stormlight Archive, #2)
- tstenner 3y agoNothing wrong with including Calvin and Hobbes five Times.
- cratermoon 3y agoBill Watterson is indeed a treasure. Are his works equal to that of Tolstoy, Gabriel García Márquez, Murasaki Shikibu, Wu Cheng'en, or Attar of Nishapur?
- ryan93 3y agothe way to use goodreads is to follow people you like and see what they read.