Against Goodreads
May 2026
- It feels like a tax on reading. If reading a book takes me four hours, but I have to spend another half hour reviewing it, that’s a 12.5% tax. Given that my demand for books is pretty elastic (because I’m not literally addicted to books and I don’t need them to survive), not counting the other costs below, I’d expect this to reduce my book reading by more than 12.5%.
- It would bring up annoying edge cases. I would need to decide, more than I ever want to, the boundaries of reviewing. If I re-read a book, should I re-review it? Does a really long essay count as a book? If I read Frankenstein, which of the three Goodreads listings should I attach my review to?
- It would change my reading patterns. I’d feel incentivized to pump up my Goodreads stats, at the cost of reading other things like embarrassing books I wouldn’t want to review in public, really long books that would bring down my ‘books read’ number, and longform writing on the internet.
- The recommendations aren’t good. The above might be slightly worth it if I thought I’d get good recommendations by spending more time on Goodreads, but I’ve literally never found a book I’ve enjoyed through Goodreads and in general find that my enjoyment of a book is not correlated at all to its Goodreads rating.
- The aesthetics are bad. Obviously a subjective judgment, but to me, the website is giving “books make you smart.”
- Spoilers are annoying. There is a huge pressure to NOT SPOIL in reviews which makes the reviews useless for why I’d want them. 90%+ of the time I read reviews, it’s after I’ve read a book, because I want to process what just happened with other people who’ve also read the book. Because Goodreads reviewers mostly avoid spoilers, and there is no good way to filter only for reviews with major spoilers, I can’t use it for what I want.
- The reviews have an ulterior motive. Reviews (especially ARC reviews) are solicited and written with an eye to proselytizing the book to the masses, which gives the whole website an air of salesmanship I want to stay far away from.
- Everything is public. The fact that all my ratings would be public gives me the ick. Sometimes I want to react to a book in private.
- Sanctuary. It’s important to be thoughtful about the things I measure, because invariably, when I measure, I want to optimize, and optimization is taxing. I want reading to remain a stress-free hobby.
All that said, I’m starting a project to read a lot of canonical works in Western literature over the next five years. It would feel good to brag to people about all the amazing books I’m reading, so I’m going to do my own version of goodreads (lowercase ‘g’ because I don’t believe in it). My initial list has one book per month, but I expect that I’ll end up reading quite a bit more. I’ll review some of these books, but because this isn’t goodreads (1) I won’t review everything I read (2) I’ll have lots of spoilers and (3) my aesthetics are great.