Thanks for sharing this. I take goodread reviews very lightly, especially for new books which I figure are either done by folks who get early access, book bloggers, etc.. (which I assume comes with their own bias at the pleasure of early access) and now throwing in 'bots' into the mix..gross!<p>I did enjoy 'The Humans' and 'How to stop time' but would never mark either of them as 5 star books, mainly because I would count books like 'Madam Bovary' or 'Rebecca'or 'Crime and Punishment' as a 5-star book. Nonetheless the praise for Midnight Library irked me before I even took a look at it. Folks are so keen on jumping to 5-stars without a critical approach to it.<p>Rather than a single 1-5 star system, a questionnaire with 1-5 stars for aspects of a book could be a better way to rate.<p>From 1-5 how would you rate:
1. the plot
2. enjoyability
3. character development
4. etc...<p>and then average out the scores across each aspect to get the user's score on the book.<p>Obviously there is incentive for goodreads to push for 5-star reviews all around, for the most part, because who wants to buy a 1-3.5 star book from Amazon? Also a larger scale or more options to choose from with rating would lead to lower conversion of rating submissions.<p>I won't claim to be perfect about rating books either, but its appalling when a book like 'The Midnight Library' (4.3 as of this time) has a higher rating than 'Crime and Punishment' (4.2).