I feel like star ratings are a really touchy subject right now in the bookish community. Many readers have stated, plain and simple, that they don't do star ratings any more, especially on Goodreads.
This is a decision that I respect. I honestly think that Goodreads needs to make its rating system more refined and nuanced. But this is something I'll talk about in tomorrow's post. Today, I want to talk about why my ratings on Goodreads tend to be between 4-5 stars.
Whether you're friends with me on Goodreads or see my review posts over on my bookstagram, you'll see that for most of my reviews, the rating out of 5 stats is usually no lower than a 4 stars; there may be a few have a rating of 3.75 or 3.5 stars.
Most of the books that I review and give star ratings to are history books. I look at a lot of factors when reading history books. The main factor I look for in a history book is whether or not the author told the history well and correctly given the sources they had.
I put "given the sources they had" because if the book is published 1-2 decades ago or more, the author may not have had access to recently discovered facts and documents of the past 1-5 years. Yes, there may be new information that either proves the history book wrong, either partially or wholly. There also may be new information that adds on to what was written in the book. However, if the book was written and published 1-2 decades before the new information, that doesn't make it a "bad history." It makes the history dated, not bad. If a history book is published recently, then I will judge it based on current knowledge of what the book is about.
This is why I tend to give history books a rating between 4-5 stars. Please see the following two posts for how I give more detailed ratings for history and historical fiction books:
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