As a little kid, reading was my favorite thing to do. There was a constant stack of paperbacks by my bed, and I was always ready to devour another story. However, when I got to late middle school and early high school, reading suddenly became uncool and that stack of books shrank. Thankfully once I started my sophomore year of high school I became obsessed with reading again. But soon after, for both myself and readers everywhere, reading became intertwined with a website called Goodreads, an Amazon-run social media style book search and rating service where readers can even buy books, (through Amazon, of course). Gone were the days of me pursuing the library or a bookstore for an hour to find the perfect book — I now checked the reviews of every book I wanted to read on the site, with said reviews often determining if I’d read the novel at all. But I recently deleted the app, and reading has never been better.Â
Goodreads, much like other kinds of social media, gives users way too much insight into what other people think. In the case of reading, I think it’s detrimental to the experience. For one, it leads to everyone reading the same books at the same time, further entrenching the bestsellers list and bestselling authors. By using Goodreads I didn’t feel like I was discovering new authors the way I used to, and, to be honest, a lot of these highly recommended books with lots of ratings were just not that great, (think of books like Caro Burke’s Yesteryear, or Belle Burden’s Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, which seemed to be literary industry plants). I felt like I was just reading the trendiest books that the algorithm was pushing rather than good books or the types of books that most interest me. The site also perpetuates what I consider the fast fashion-ication of the publishing industry.
A lot of reviews and even book descriptions now rely on a list of tropes rather than describing the plot, and while there’s nothing wrong with reading a book for a trope, that’s not the reason that I read or what makes me gravitate towards a book. This focus on tropes rather than plot has led to so many seemingly rip offs of popular novels that are allowed to be published because people are so hungry for more, no matter the quality, flooding the industry with novels that feel unnecessary and quickly patched together. Because this type of trope heavy novel is really popular right now, it sometimes feels like I’m just being recommended the same book over and over again.Â
The reading experience is also somewhat diminished by the way that people aren’t picking up random books on a whim as much, and instead looking at reviews before they buy or rent. There is a certain magic lost when books don’t feel like a surprise or spur of the moment pick, and there are also fewer indie bookstores and indie authors being supported when books are being bought through the Goodreads site through either Kindle or print. For me at least, Goodreads also made reading feel a bit like a chore. For example, once I started a book I felt I had to finish it, no matter if I liked it or not, and it also made my reading experience focus too much on the quantity of books I was reading rather than the quality of my reading experience due to the sites’ focus on reading goals and number of books read. Finally, there’s the elephant in the room: Amazon itself. Amazon is a company that a lot of people, including myself, don’t want to support for a lot of reasons, from labor issues to environmental issues and so much more.Â
I’ve really enjoyed returning to the way I used to read when I was a little kid, which was with joy and without exterior input, and would recommend for every reader everywhere to do the same. Right now it seems like there’s an app and a site for everything, but maybe reading can be a place where we turn away from that. Just last week I picked up a collection of essays by an author that I had never read or heard of before, and I’m excited to experience the work with no preexisting ideas of how the book will be. And if it’s bad that’s okay, I think we can all be a little less afraid of a bad book taking up a spot on our bookshelves, there is perhaps some value in that too.Â