Leaving the numbers racket

How I resolved to dequantify my taste

I read 189 books in 2024. These ranged from short (34 pages) to long (616 pages), with an average length of 205 pages.

The first book I read was Baby Boom, an experimental manga collection by Yuichi Yokoyama (which I enjoyed enough to write about here). The final one was The Compleat Enchanter, by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt - an intermittently charming collection of mid-century light-fantasy novellas that I slogged through across the second half of the year and finished on the afternoon of December 31. In between, I read 187 additional books, covering novels, nonfiction books, comics, poetry collections, and more - from highly popular to utterly obscure.

But wait - is this strictly on the level? It would be much more accurate to say that in 2024 I “logged 189 books as ‘Read’ in Goodreads,” the book-focused social networking site owned by Amazon. The figures and examples above come from Goodreads’ “My Year in Books” summary - the Spotify Wrapped for bibliophiles. Of these 189 books, some - like Baby Boom - I actually started reading in 2023 and only finished last year. Others, like The Compleat Enchanter, are books consisting of other books - in this case, an omnibus of five separate works compiled under a single cover. So should that count as five books, or just one?

Further complicating the tidy figure of 189 are the dozens of books I read in 2024 that are not included in the Goodreads total at all - primarily children’s picture books and short-form comics and graphic novels. While I initially began “shelving” books into Goodreads in order to keep track of my reading over time, I eventually stopped logging these smaller pieces because I didn’t quite know how to rate them.

You see, the functionality of Goodreads saddles every entry with the ubiquitous five-star ratings scale that can be found on pretty much any consumer-focused website today. When you log a book, you’re encouraged to rate it and write a review, so as to help other potential readers of the book determine whether they might find it interesting as well.

It seems benign enough - after all, who hasn’t wondered what their fellow readers think of what they’re reading? In the past, you could only uncover this via word of mouth or by reading the work of critics, who, as professionals hired to share their expert opinions, could hardly be considered average readers. In the halcyon early days of social media, the opportunity to pick the brains of everyday readers - and offer your own insights in return - felt not only freeing and egalitarian, but fun.

Thanks to its tight focus on a topic I was passionate about (books!) and its all-encompassing catalogue (I’ve only ever encountered one or two volumes that aren’t in the system), I found myself plastering my opinion all over Goodreads long after I stopped posting regularly on any other social network. Even then, I eventually stopped writing reviews every time I logged a book. In part, this was because I decided to transfer that time and energy into the more freeform platform of this newsletter - but looking back, I see that more as an effect than a cause. The truth is, I began to feel oppressed by the pressure to devise pithy, clever, insightful ways of describing my experience with every single book. No one was forcing me to do this, of course, but over time it grew to feel like an unwelcome obligation. Didn’t I somehow owe it to the book’s author and my fellow readers to make my voice be heard? I finally realized that no, of course not - there are already so many voices out there, they’ll be fine without me. Once I surrendered my vanity, it was as easy to stop compulsively posting on Goodreads as it had been on Facebook and Instagram.

But a vestige of this former habit remained: those insidious little stars! It may have taken time and effort to articulate my nuanced thoughts about a book, but reducing it to a numerical score was so simple as to be nearly unconscious. I’m a softie, of course, so I graded everything on a curve. Four stars - “I liked this!” - became my default. I gave three stars when something was okay - anything below that and I generally wouldn’t bother to finish the book. Five stars was reserved for works that sparked something especially exciting in me - a sense of novelty or daring that went above and beyond expectations.

Still harmless enough, right? So it seemed to me, until the stars began to infect the reading process itself. Even with my personal system of offering only three different ratings - call them check, check-plus, and check-minus - the impulse to quantify seeped deep into the grain of the reading experience. For years, I didn’t even know it was happening. I’d be a third of the way through a book and find myself wondering whether a slow-moving section would downgrade it from four to three stars. Or I’d start asking what a four-star book might have to do to level up to a five.

This isn’t to say that I was upset by being “taken out of” the book. There are plenty of good reasons to read critically and consciously - many books require it, and even those that don’t can benefit from taking a periodic step back and contemplating what it’s all about. But when this happens so crudely - and at the behest of a corporate-owned consumer engine, no less - it can rapidly become a distraction, or even damaging to the reading experience.

This became especially clear to me this year while reading some of the picture books I mentioned. Despite not having young kids myself anymore, I love illustrated books for children. My sweet spot is vintage stuff (interrogating the complex nostalgia of which could fill many weeks’ worth of posts), but I also enjoy keeping up with contemporary artists and authors. I find myself at a loss, though, at how to critique such things. I’m not the target audience, of course, nor am I an expert in the field. I sometimes pick up titles that would endlessly delight a five-year-old, but which have little effect on me - because it turns out I’m not five! So what sort of numerical figure would I assign my opinion for a book like that? Should it reflect how much I enjoyed it personally, or how much a hypothetical five-year-old might like it? If the former, what good is my ranking to anyone but me? If the latter, how honest would it be?

Spiraling through these thought processes has helped me realize the absurdity of quantifying my opinion in the first place. Everyone who rates books on Goodreads has their own individual rubric. It’s fascinating for me to see someone who writes very warmly of a book but only gives it three stars, since I’ve traditionally graded on a curve. But if your three equals my four, what does any of it even mean in the end? Especially when the ultimate goal of the platform is to harvest the data we freely provide to sell more books?

To be clear, I think there are worse things than selling books. And I do think that, in the aggregate, there’s some value to authors, publishers, and readers in seeing a rough approximation of public opinion, however clumsy and inaccurate it might be. The problem comes when any of it is taken to represent anything meaningful beyond the broadest of heuristics.

I’m fascinated by numbers where they truly count, and I don’t begrudge them their centrality to our world - the medicine and technology that keep us alive, for instance, would be impossible without them. But I’m not sure they’re inherently more trustworthy than words. The very fact that it’s impossible to make a simple numerical statement about how many books I read last year is a reminder that numbers are tools - only as good as their context and intent. If they stop being useful to us, we should feel free to leave them behind and focus on whatever is.

That’s why, for the turn to 2025, I’ve decided to stop rating the books I read. (This goes for movies on Letterboxd too, which present me with the same conundrum.) Where I feel I have something interesting to say, I might return to writing short, qualitative reviews - and if I find something particularly deserving or want to show support, I can still choose to boost a book with an occasional five-star rating. It’s the habit of mentally reducing the endless of complexity of books to a few simple digits that I want to step away from.

I see this as part of a larger effort to do a better job appreciating things for what they are, rather than getting caught up in what they represent. Too much of my life is spent cohabiting with the symbols of things rather than the things themselves. Leaving rankings behind might render them less effective at preemptively haunting my pleasure in reading and viewing. My hope is that allowing myself to simply have an experience - and refraining from facilely observing myself trying to have that experience, at least in the moment - might make me a better reader, a better writer, and a better person overall. I find numbers vexing in the best of circumstances - if they’re not doing anyone any good, then I’d like to keep them the hell away from my feelings.