[MrJohz]

Eh, I find Goodreads reviews really difficult to get a handle on. Moreso than, say, Rotten Tomatoes, where even if the aggregate rating is different to the rating that I'd give a film, the reviews are at least useful enough that I know what I'm going to get. With Goodreads, it's much more difficult to get a feel for what a book is going to be like based on the reviews.

I wonder if this is because the literary world is a lot not heterogenous. Making a film is very expensive, so only a (relatively) small number get made each year, and they tend to fit into specific categories. If you know what sorts of films you like, it's easier to find more films that match what you want. Books, in comparison, have far more niches, and those niches often seem shallower, so that a single book often fits in multiple spaces for different reasons. I think this makes it harder to know exactly what sort of things work well for you in a book, which makes reviews harder to compare, because other people will often be reading a book very differently to you.

I think this is similar to board games, which also tend to have many shallower niches, but at least for myself, I know which reviewers match my sort of games, and I know how to interpret their opinions. I don't feel like I have that same intuition in the literary world yet.