![]() In my nine years on the site, I’ve noticed a trend: excellent (and often critically-acclaimed) women-centric literary fiction tends to fall into the gulf between 3.2 and 3.8 stars. As a reader, I can’t resist scanning the star ratings of books I’ve read or am interested in to see how they’ve been received by my friends and other users. Most Goodreads users I know use it not because we actually like it, but because we haven’t found a better alternative.Īs an author with a book listed on Goodreads, I absolutely stalk how my book is performing. Amazon owns Goodreads and has little incentive to improve the site since no other competitor has nearly as many users or as vast a digital library. I’m always getting excessive notifications I have no memory of signing up for, and searching my “shelves” in an intuitive way is basically impossible. For a general interest site with over 90 million members it’s stunningly mediocre. I’ve been using Goodreads to keep track of books I’ve read and want to read since 2011. The Madievsky Rule is this: 3.5 stars on Goodreads is the sweet spot for contemporary literary fiction written by women about women. In the spirit of quick-and-dirty rules of thumb, I have my own literary pet theory. It’s less a summative evaluation than a quick-and-dirty assessment of whether the work meets even a basic representational standard. The test consists of a simple yes-or-no question: Does it depict two women in conversation about something other than a man? The Bechdel test doesn’t assess the quality of representation, nor does it determine whether the work is told through a feminist lens. Cartoonist Alison Bechdel introduced the test in her comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For in 1985 as a means of assessing the ways women are portrayed in fiction. If you’ve used the internet to read book or film reviews in the last decade, you’ve probably heard of the Bechdel test.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |