The New Year began with my spouse questioning my ethics.
I read a book, which shall remain nameless because I didn’t like it. The blurbs promised twists, which I hate. Not twist themselves. Every good mystery turns on its head at least once. But books advertised as “twisty?” No, thank you. Too much gore, no one likeable at all, makes a reader feel gross. As always, I should have passed on this psychological thriller, but the (nameless) setting was so compelling that I got in a queue for it on the e-library.
And then I got caught in the mire of wondering if this book was as bad as I thought. I kept wondering if we’d get a twist that would redeem it all, including the pitiful narrator.
We did not, but I read to the very end to see if we would.
And then I gave it four stars on Goodreads.
Hence the ethics questioning from Chris Green.
I give every book that I read four stars on Goodreads.
I don’t want to rate books. I just want to keep track of the books I read. I don’t have time or energy to puzzle out a rating for every book I read. I also don’t want to hurt the sales of living authors through aggregated review data. I figure they’re all getting review bombed most of the time, because people are generally horrible on the internet.
I give every book four stars.
And then if I don’t like a book, I never mention it again. I don’t write about it here. I pretend it doesn’t exist except on my Reading Challenge for the year, along with my four star rating.
Unless… someone I know in person asks if a book is worth reading, in which case I grimace and shake my head.
I tried to see if I could add books to my Reading Challenge without giving them a rating on the star system. All I achieved was the stereotypical middle-aged technological incompetence of entirely deleting the book from online history. That means it’s possible that I’ll accidentally pick up this miserable book again in ten years’ time. All the dumb twists will come back to me in chapter one, when I could have just left the book safely forgotten with its four stars.
In other words, I say that my ethics are just fine. Four stars.
