Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I listened to this on audiobook with my mom while we drove to Santa Fe. Believe me, just about anything would be entertaining in that situation. We’re not a picky people. But this, hoo boy, this book is bore-city USA, population: me and my mom in the car. If our car trip was a country, it would be Boresylvania. If it was a state, it would be Massachusetts. Yeah, I said it. That place is boring. Hot take!
This book is just an endless string of names and places, and I just had the hardest time keeping track of who was doing what and where. Not because the names were Hawaiian. I couldn’t even keep my English explorers straight. The only thing that I followed in this book was the bit about plate lunch.
Not my favorite.
While we’re going negative, I have something in my craw. Which I assume means butt. I have a thing in my butt that’s bothering me.
I ran across this line in a review of another book on Goodreads today:
“2.70 “it was okay and I liked some of it”
I’m waging a constant battle against the halving of stars on Goodreads, and this was like a slap in the face. Or maybe a slap in the craw (butt).
Okay, you realize that in breaking reviews down in this way, you’re rating books on a scale of ONE to FIFTY!? That if each potential rating between 0 and 5 stars has 10 divisions, we now have 50 possible ratings a book can receive?
A thoughtful look at the Amazon reviews for a non-book product give a person a pretty good idea of whether or not it’s a good product, a bad product, or mediocre. And that’s a product that might not be considered art, such as a set of blue towels. It’s pretty easy with towels. What’s the size like, and when I put them on liquid, do they pick up said liquid? That’s about it, right? I mean, it’s tough to delineate the difference between a 6-star towel and a 7-star. That seems to be without purpose, in my eyes.
As for books, I think we get really caught up in the importance of our personal star ratings. It’s not THAT important, people, where we need 50 different options. I don’t think it’s even as important as 10 options, honestly.
What are you expecting of a book? For a book to be 50/50, it would have to, I don’t know, cause a spontaneous, 8-hour nocturnal emission in the night following every reading. For a book to be like a .2/50? I read Kim Kardashian’s selfie book, and even it was better than .2/50. It was a book that didn’t physically harm my hands in holding it. I didn’t get a communicable disease from touching it. I don’t plan, if I have a deformed child, to blame the deformity on Kim’s book. So why bother?
To put it another way, explain to me the difference between a book that’s a 2.6 and a 2.7. Just explain it to me. Because I can tell you the difference between a 2 and a 3 out of 5.
Which might be at the core of the problem. Maybe the Goodreads breakdown doesn’t work and we have to come up with our own.
Goodreads does it like this:
1. Didn’t like it
2. It was ok
3. Liked it
4. Really liked it
5. It was amazing
Personally, I feel like that’s pretty fair and understandable. What would a 10-star breakdown be like?
1. This book made me want to shake a baby I didn’t even know.
2. This book made me want to shake my own baby, but only momentarily.
3. I didn’t like it.
4. I didn’t like it, and I’m not happy about it, but it had its moments.
5. It was ok. If I knew what I know now, I wouldn’t read it again, but here we are, ever-onward.
6. This was almost passable as something I would read. Close. Not hateful.
7. This is the minimum standard for what I would call decent.
8. This is good. Not great. But overall, a good experience. Would recommend to some.
9. Really good. I think other people should definitely read this book over others.
10. The ultimate reading experience.
That seems so micro. Also, I think that a larger scale breaks down the system in one significant way.
If you look at weird, ridiculous books as often as I do, you see something where people have given titles a 1-star rating having never read it. For example, for some reason, my reading of Modelland causes a book about re-educating gay people to be straight to pop up in my recommendations. Interpret that connection as you will. Most of the reviews for this book are 1-star, screw this book, and so on.
I’m not a huge fan of a book getting torn down because people disagree with its stance. Gay re-education is an extreme example, but…
Let me put it this way. I saw a comment on a review regarding Book X. And the quote I read said, “I haven’t read [Book X], but I already know it’s amazing.”
Really? You do? Because…how?
So I’m not all that pumped about people giving high reviews just because they “know” something is amazing either.
Here’s where the problem sets in: It’s my thinking that a 10-star scale causes the 1- and 10-star reviews to have a lot more weight. Because if someone is rating a book they haven’t read a word of, whether it be a rating of hate or love, it’s probably going to be a 10 or a 1.
We’ve all seen this. Someone hates an author, or an “author” like Kim Kardashian, and they give her book a 1-star rating without reviewing it, usually followed by about 10 gifs with no text in between.
We’ve all also seen the book that hasn’t been released yet and somehow has a couple 5-star reviews because people are EXCITED about it. These are often accompanied by gifs, which often seem to be pulled from Supernatural. I’ve never watched Supernatural, but I have to wonder if, at some point, they were writing episodes with the idea of having moments gif-ified. I wonder if you put all the available, already-existing Supernatural gifs together, what percent of the series you could watch.
Maybe the problem is that the Goodreads star descriptions don’t work for people. Let me make some alternate suggestions:
1 Star: I would dig up my grandmother’s corpse and put this in the coffin with her to have the world be rid of it, but I’m afraid the terribality of this book will re-animate her and she’ll haunt me forever, so I guess I’ll just try and return it.
2 Star: If this book were a state, it would be Massachusetts (got you again, suckers!)
3 Star: I’m not mad that I read this. It wasn’t a total waste of time. Having read this, I would read it again for the first time, but wouldn’t be likely to re-read. If I invented a mind wipe machine and made a list of things to read, this probably wouldn’t be on it, but wouldn’t be on the list of books titled “Bury With Grandmother’s Corpse, Don’t Ask Questions”.
4 Star: This was good. I liked this book. I could see re-reading this book. When someone else has read this book, I’m kind of excited to talk about it with them. When I hear this book is being made into a movie, I’m somewhere between “I’m a little nervous they’ll screw it up” and “Well, it wasn’t a masterpiece”.
5 Star: If I had the choice between a nocturnal emission and reading this book, I would read this book.