LordBlam t1_ixwjt7j wrote on November 26, 2022 at 10:58 PM

This is a super common response to reading the “classics” in school. See e.g., Goodreads, and note how reviews for classics invariably are lower than thousands of objectively worse books. There are many reasons, but mainly because schools assign classics, which means you have lots of people reading something because they HAVE to and not because they WANT to. Nobody likes that.

Also: (1) Not everyone subjectively likes the same books, even great books. (2) Not everyone has enough reading experience/age/social-historical perspective to appreciate some classics. (3) A lot of classics are tragedies, and lots of people don’t want to read to be bummed out. And (4) some classics are dated and are taught today at least partly because of inertia.

Thus, I can predict (without checking beforehand) that The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Middlemarch, A Hundred Years of Solitude, and most other “great books” almost certainly have much lower Goodreads reviews than the latest Brandon Sanderson “Cosmere” book.

francisf0reverr OP t1_ixwr9cq wrote on November 26, 2022 at 11:57 PM

Yeah I can see that. I didn't like 1984 when we studied it last year but actually goodreads got me to think about it and I rated it 5 stars. I have loved a lot of the plays I have studied though. Othello is so interesting and I got such a good question for my exam last year for the Crucible (it was about the disturbing nature of Abigail and Proctor's relationship- don't even get me started!!). Goodreads is not the most reliable lol I think all of the colleen hoover books are rated higher than Othello 😭

LordBlam t1_ixwrxph wrote on November 27, 2022 at 12:02 AM

Yeah, I’m not suggesting that Goodreads ratings are an example of the best way to encapsulate a book’s worth, but it as good a way as any to glimpse a simple thumb up/down opinion for a broad cross-section of the population. It’s easy to see on Goodreads that there’s a lot of punitive downvoting that goes on with assigned classics. You seldom see this with regular “popular” books.