I’m a big time Ishiguro fan and can’t for the life of me understand why his books are rated so low on Goodreads?
My hunch is that he doesn’t always go for the happy endings, not always a perfect resolution, and can leave someone unsettled but the books themselves are great works of literary art. It won’t end like some superhero movie with the good guys saving the world from the bad guys
But am I missing something?
Also no spoilers on any of his books!
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Brother Karamazov is like a 4.4 on Goodreads. Don’t trust the masses.
His books a lil odd and feel like character studies which I love.
But it would be boring if everyone liked all the same things! And had the same taste.
Now we have the very non-boring consensus that Colleen Hoover beats the shit out of Virginia Woolf.
Haha. Nah those are genuinely bad 😂 I made a very general statement
I would say he’s sort of a patchy author, some of his books are legitimate masterpeices and some just aren’t. I haven’t ready Anything by Him that is outright bad, but I’d rank some of his books pretty low compared to others
I’m curious which ones you rate highly and which ones poorly? I don’t like NLMG and Klara and Sun as much as the others but that has largely to with the genre. Still enjoyable but not close some of his other works.
This is a prima facie case that Goodreads readers are not terribly discerning. Ishiguro is a genius.
Never Let Me Go was such a disaster. I tried Remains of the Day, but I didn’t get far bc I was still mad about Never Let Me Go…
I don’t know. I find literary fiction tends to get lower ratings in general. My opinion is you have different types of readers, but two in general. The first type are the readers that read for fun, and aren’t necessarily “sophisticated” and sometimes just critique it based on their own preferences. Second, you have the more sophisticated readers who analyze as though they are reading it for class and rate it low based on what deficiencies in the authors writing they perceive.
Where the joining is of the Venn Diagram that includes “Most Readers” and “Social Media” is not a place where Ishiguro lives.
His books are all in the 3.5 and above range, which is what good books usually get in my opinion. Remains of the Day is even higher at 4.14, I think that’s about the highest rating that a classic will get, cause you’re always going to have people reading who don’t connect with it. When you look at the books rated like 4.3+ it’s usually stuff that’s ONLY read by its target audience and basically guaranteed to be highly rated for that reason. Often really bad stuff honestly.
They mostly aren’t. Any quality book normally comes out with a rating in the 3.5 to 4.2 bracket. It’s only pulp for a particular fan group that gets higher ratings because normal people don’t read it and therefore rate it.
Anyway why would you care what goodreads thinks when the man has a Nobel Prize for Literature?
I’ve read some truly awful books that have 4.5 ratings on Goodreads.
I read The Buried Giant, my first and only of his reads. I found his characters dull, and more importantly, very repetitive. The protagonist ended ever sentence when talking to his wife with the same word of endearment 9 times out of 10 (smething like “only a little bit left to walk, Darling”. It drove me INSANE. Every time he addresses her (which constitutes the bulk of the text as it’s based around the 2 of them on a walking journey) he says " yadda, yadda, yadda, Darling" The plot was interesting, but man, I could not get over his dialogue. Really wanted to like the book more than I did.
I’ve read Never Let Me Go and genuinely love it, but it has a very meandering and anti-climactic style (and is often very incorrectly as a horror sci-fi), and I imagine it’s not for everyone.
I hated The Remains of the Day so much that it’s probably one of the worst books I’ve ever read, it was so bland and just nothing. I was surprised that he won the Nobel prize to be honest. I don’t really trust Goodreads ratings, but at least they got this one right!
It’s not about the lack of happy endings, I enjoy sad endings of all kinds and above happy ones, it’s just that his plots don’t captivate me and I just get bored reading his monotone voice. It feels like pure torture. I try to be compassionate with certain books or writers, Ishiguro gets none.
I know you did a superhero movie comparison but I’d say superhero movies are a low bar already, but Ishiguro isn’t far off. His books are just a grade above said equivalent of superhero movies, just make it bland with no redeeming feature. There’s nothing innovative, it’s just “this is deep, bruv” tumblr post captions. He doesn’t go for innovative methods, he doesn’t do unique. There’s so many other great writers that people can choose to read, but instead we’re all glued to him because he won the Nobel Prize.
Some of them are wonderful (Remains of day, Never let me go) and some them are shockingly bad (When we were orphans, Nocturns, Buried Giant). He’s such a mixed bag.
Goodreads scores are the least indicative of quality out of any rating site ever, site is overrun by adults who read y/a or smut