Anyone who spends a lot of time reading book review blogs and goodreads (and you probably are one of those people if you’re reading this) has probably noticed that two people can have wildly different opinions about the same book. I have often seen goodreads pages for books where one reviewer will be flailing wildly with happiness about how great the book is while the next with be ranting angrily about how much they hated it. Of course there are some books that a majority of people share feelings about-Harry potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone has almost entirely 4 and 5 star ratings and at least some of the few low ratings it has are joke reviews (there is one review from Voldemort complaining that the book is a disgrace to all pure bloods)- but a majority of books have very varied reviews.
So the question is, what do these varied reviews say about the quality of a book? Are some people right in their opinions while others are wrong? Or does it just depend on what people are looking to get out of a book, or their subjective taste in books?
Personally, I think that there are no “right” or “wrong” opinions of books of books but that there are objective observations you can make about them. For example a lot of dystopian books that have been written in the last few years are not very original. This is a fact-if you’ve read a lot of YA dystopian fiction, you will see that a lot of them follow a very similar structure. However some people are more bothered by a lack of originality than others. This means that some people will automatically think a book is bad because of its lack of originality while others might have other criteria that they care more about and therefore like the book anyway. So opinions are subjective and people are allowed to feel how they do about a book. No one’s right or wrong, it’s just a variation in expectations.
Do you agree with me? Or do you think it’s possible to rate a book completely objectively?
Also, if you have any blogging critiques for me (does my writing style sound preachy? Do you like my choice of topics?) feel free to let me know in the comments. I’m very new to this and I want to improve!
Thoughtful Adventures 
I 100% agree with you! And I wish ALL bookworms would realise this, omg, it’d make the world a nicer place. It’s reeeeally frustrating to me when people get all righteous about their love/hate of a book and start abusing people with opposing opinions. Like books are subjective, peoples!! If we all liked the same books the world would be SUPER VERY BORING. XD I think it’s kind of awesome how we can all have such wildly different opinions on the same book. It makes the book rather powerful, right?! It can get so many different emotions and affect people so differently!
Thanks for stopping by @ Paper Fury!
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I agree that it’s great that people are unique and have varying opinions of books, but I have to admit that sometimes it seems like it would be a lot easier to figure out what books are worth reading if everyone had similar opinions… But then as you point out, that’d be really boring so I guess it’s just better to figure out who shares my taste in books and read their reviews 🙂
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I tried to put a smiley face at the end of that comment but it didn’t work 😦
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I don’t know, that’s a pretty interesting point 🙂 I think on one hand there’s actual writing techniques and stuff that you can do wrong which would make it a bad book (like basic story structure, grammar, plot fundamentals) and if you screw that up then there’s not a lot you can do to redeem yourself. But on the other hand you can have a book that has a perfect structure, grammar, representation, characters, theme, whatever and people can still hate it because they personally didn’t connect with the protagonist or something. It’s much harder to have a good book than a bad one, which sucks.
At the end of the day, I think books are subjective. Even the most horrible book can be someone’s favourite. Thanks for visiting The Endless Oceans of my Mind!
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I agree with you. I think that most books that mess up the actual writing techniques probably don’t get published though (although I have read some poorly written books) so we are mostly left to develop subjective opinions toward books that are objectively pretty good.
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Oh, and I forgot to ask. Did you draw your header yourself? It looks amazing!!!
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I wish I could draw that well! But no, I found it on the internet.
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