In this video, Ariel talks about how books are different, and deserve to be looked at differently.
While I'm reading a book, it's pretty easy to determine if it's going to get a good or bad rating in my mind. I may read a totally mushy gushy contemporary (Like, say, The Fault in Our Stars) that is just light and fluffy and absolutely love it. So I give it 5 stars.
Then I might read a book like say, 1984, (or, she mentions Animal Farm), that is completely different, and is trying to make you feel something totally unrelated to that of the fluffy contemporary. And I give that 5 stars.
Does that then mean that I think that the 5 stars that I gave to the sappy love story are the same 5 stars that I gave to the large scale, thought provoking, ideas that are presented in much more mature selections?
ABSOLUTELY NOT!
Books are different. Much the same as people are different, so are our reading selections. A child is different than an adult. We wouldn't base our opinions of a 4 year old kid's behavior the same way we would a 35 year old man's behavior. So why then, would we be expected to use a uniform scale to rate what we read? If I rated 1984, or To Kill A Mockingbird, which are both highly influential books, with 5 stars, and rated Anna and the French Kiss or The Fault in Our Stars with 5 stars, that by no means means that I think they are great for the same reason, or that I'm somehow lesser for liking a book targeted to teens and liking a book targeted toward adults too. Adults and kids. Love and Theory. Epic and Sonnet. Books are different.
Books are different, and thus should be rated, as Ariel mentioned, by what they are trying to accomplish.
If a book was trying to make me laugh, smile, cry, and swoon, and it did all those things, then it's going to get a good rating. If a book was trying to make me think, and question what I know, and it did that, then it'll get a good rating. If it didn't do what it was trying to do, and instead made me cringe the whole way through, then, bad rating.
Every book gets a rating based on itself. Some may think that I just give every book I read a good rating, and then there's no point to it. But that's not how it works. Rating a book isn't, or at least it shouldn't be, a process that is generalized and the same for every piece of literature. I will rate a book based on what it wanted me to feel, what it wanted me to think, and overall, on if I liked it.
Go watch Ariel's video. (linked above) She does a much better job of getting her thoughts across than I do here, but I just had to make a blog response to this because it's so true! She has some very very good points on the matter, and I agree with her wholeheartedly!
If you've stuck around, thanks for listening to my bookish rant, and let me know in the comments what you think! I'd love to hear your opinions!
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