Happy Friday! This post is pre-written, so apologies if you leave a comment and it takes me a couple of days to respond.

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly bookish discussion meme created by Rukky @Eternity Books and co-hosted by Aria @Book Nook Bits and Dini @DiniPandaReads. Each Friday, bloggers will write posts about a particular topic and share on their blog.

How do you read star ratings from other bloggers/readers? Do you consider star ratings seen on a book blog, Bookstagram, or BookTok differently from ratings on sites like Goodreads?

How much does a star rating affect your decision to purchase/borrow/read a book, and does it depend on who/where the star rating comes from?

This week’s topic is a trickier one for me to talk about, purely because I haven’t star-rated a book in years, and I don’t tend to use them for information purposes either.
I’m going to explain why, and try to answer the above questions in one general go.

I don’t rate books with stars, and I don’t take star ratings at face value purely because star rating is so, so subjective. My 5 stars are absolutely not going to be the same as your 5 stars. I might have rated a book 5 stars because I had so much fun reading it, while you reserve your 5 stars only for the books you think are perfect in writing, plot and character. Does that mean we are both wrong? No, it means the system is arbitrary and therefore to me, not an important factor in whether or not a book is ‘good’ or one that I might like to read.

I put my value in reading written reviews. I want to know why, not what. Why did you like this particular story? Why did you love or hate that character? Was the writing descriptive? Was it lyrical? Those things matter more than whether it was worth 4 or 5 stars.
Now, don’t get me wrong, star ratings do offer a decent guideline of what a person thought about a book. However, I only see that as useful if you know the person’s tastes. If I give a nature book 2 stars, you should immediately know there is probably an issue with it, since you know I read a lot of nature writing. However, if a stranger pops up with a 5-star review of the same book, whose rating do you trust more? Is one of us wrong?

When I am poking around on social media, I don’t often see star ratings. The people I follow don’t make them obvious, or don’t use them at all. If I see posts that just list a person’s 5-star books with no reasoning, I don’t tend to pay them any attention because they don’t actually tell me anything.
Using book tracking sites is another thing entirely, and while I don’t use it anymore, Goodreads, of course, puts a lot of weight behind these ratings. If I do happen to find myself there reading reviews, I always make sure to read a variety of reviews across different ratings to get a more nuanced overview of a book.

I am aware that I probably sound very cynical in this post, but I’ve honestly never really been on board with star ratings. I love that some people love them and have proper systems for their ratings. These do make sense to me when the person clearly lays out their system, because it helps me understand a bit more about why they like certain books (eg. G with her CAWPILE system, this I do like). It’s just not a thing that works for me in my personal reading life. I generally read what I want, no matter how high or low its Goodreads average!

You Tell Me: Do you STAR-RATE books?