How Do You Even Rate a Book? (Because I Honestly Don’t Know Anymore)

If you asked 100 readers how they rate the books they read, I’m willing to bet that most of them would give you a pretty standard answer. “Oh, I use the classic 1 to 5 star system. You know, like Goodreads.” Some people might toss in a half star here and there. A few overachievers might say they use quarter stars or color-coded spreadsheets. But almost everyone is using some variation of the good ol’ 5-star scale.

And in theory, that sounds great. A simple, universal rating system. Clean. Organized. Easy to understand.

Except, it’s actually kind of a mess.

Because if you dig a little deeper, you’ll find that what qualifies as a 5-star read for one person might be completely different for someone else. For some readers, a 5-star book is a perfect book. The kind of story with zero flaws, tight prose, and characters so well-written they practically jump off the page. For others, a 5-star rating means, “This book made me cry in a train station bathroom and I will never recover, even though it was technically kind of a hot mess.”

Same rating. Completely different standards.

So how do we take the star ratings we see on Goodreads, Fable, or StoryGraph as any kind of accurate measurement of whether a book is good? Honestly? We kind of don’t. Or at least we shouldn’t.

There’s a lot of discourse about it online, and some of it makes valid points. But personally, I don’t think it really matters that much. I’ve learned to treat average ratings as vague signals, not rules. Like a weather forecast. It might be sunny for someone else, but that doesn’t mean you won’t get rained on.

Here’s how I usually approach it:

• If a book has an average rating of 1 to 2 stars and over 20,000 ratings? I probably won’t read it—unless someone I know specifically tells me I have to.

• Books that average between 3 and 4 stars are fair game. They’re usually doing something interesting, even if not everyone loves them.

• Books with 5-star averages and massive followings? Honestly, that’s cult behavior. Sometimes it works, but sometimes you just end up peer-pressured into reading something mid.

Also, number of ratings does matter. But not in the way you might think. Just because a million people have rated something doesn’t mean it’s a masterpiece. Take ACOTAR for example. The original trilogy? A solid 3-star experience for me. Enjoyable, but also kind of mid. The later books in the series? Let’s just say they took all the worst parts of the earlier books and doubled down. And yet the ratings are glowing. Millions of them. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because people are emotionally attached. Maybe because it’s a comfort series. But it proves that popularity does not equal quality.

Also, one last thing. If a book series starts with a decent number of ratings, then steadily drops off with each book while the average rating goes up? Red flag. I see you, survivor bias.

So yeah. Star ratings are chaos. But we love them anyway.