Why Goodreads.com is the Worst

I don't read much. Hell, I don't get out much. When I have a night by myself, and I've worn myself thin on video games of any variety, I always do pretty much the same thing: I cook myself up some chicken strips and french fries, plop down on the couch, put my feet up, and watch a movie I've never seen before. It's invigorating, even if the movie is awful. This complete indulgence of self is fueled by our classic All-American food culture and pop culture. It's even better exemplified when I fall asleep watching baseball. Reading, conversely, is pretty much the last thing on my self-indulgence to-do list.

Don't get me wrong though, I have a pretty active imagination. There are times, when a story is good enough, where I can go long hours reading a book. It doesn't even necessarily have to be that interesting. But a book is an investment. It takes much longer to devour a book than it does to pop in a movie and make chicken strips. A book is like a romantic relationship, and movies are like mindless sex. A book could eventually lead you to the kind of euphoria a movie gives you instantaneously, but it takes forever. And it might not even work out at all. You may think you've landed yourself a killer book, but by the end you feel miserable and several hours have been wasted.

And I know, there are you crazy people who read a mile a minute and finished all of both the canonical and non-canonical Star Wars novels before you were twelve. You won't appreciate anything I have to say here. If books are like relationships, you've had your way with the books you read by the third date and dump them for the next book in line. Libraries are like nightclubs, and every book is a one-night stand. You're willing to read trash because you can read anything you want to without wasting any time.

Regular schmoes like me will understand that reading a book isn't so easy. We also understand that selecting a book isn't very easy either. It's a complicated process, and we need advice on which books to read and which to stay away from. If you're like me, then most of your friends aren't heavy readers either. Most of your friends are worse than even me though. They read only when a book becomes insanely popular, and society requires them to read it to remain cool (Twilight, Harry Potter, et al). These friends, and heavy reading friends, are not who you want to ask for book advice. Both are so opinionated and skewed on their book ideals, you'd wind up either reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being or Dear John. You'd probably get something out of both, but I can promise you that you don't want to read either of them.

So where does one turn? How can an easy decision be reached on what to read? A friend of mine told me to check out goodreads.com. He said that people who read books give reviews on what they thought about the book, and give it a rating. I thought this was a really neat idea, until I actually got to reading some of the reviews. I'd like to point out that 99% of these reviews were written by people who are not professional literary critics. And while some were written by a non-biased, intelligent person - most were written by people who either didn't really read the book, or love/hate the book for no good reason. The ratings are totally arbitrary, because hey, if a book is boring it obviously deserves one star. But if it has a gratuitous sex scene, FIVE STARS!

This site is absolutely no meter for what a "good read" is. How, for example, could Twilight be included in the list for the best novels of all time, and the list for the worst novels of all time? It's either the best, or the worst. Period. It can't be both. Every review is skewed in the 2.0-4.0 out of 5.0 range, because for every good review there's an oppositely valued bad review. Even classics like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, number ONE on the list of bests, isn't even close to a 5.0. This rating system would make a lot more sense if certified literary critics were the only people adding to the ratings statistics. A comparable system would be that of metacritic.com, where only professionals are allowed to add to the discussion. The numbers are sometimes odd, but even in that system, the greatest examples of art are allowed to be truly great, and to relish in their greatness. On GoodReads, every book is mediocre, and why would I want to read a mediocre book?

GoodReads makes the decision making process harder than it was before we started, which is obviously not its intended effect. And doing the opposite of what you set out to do is the exact definition of failing. And that's all the GoodReads does. Fail.