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!
The number rating is a composite of everyone who ever read the book that decided to leave a review. If you look at the written reviews for Ishiguro you’ll see that a lot of the 3* ratings are people who consider his writing good but didn’t find it resonating with them personally and a lot of the 1* reviews are from people who wanted something different/didn’t resonate with how the story was told and as such found it boring.
I do use goodreads, but only to look at the reviews themselves. The number is meaningless as people take anything less than 5* as being crap rather than a 3* meaning that it’s probably pretty good but maybe a bit niche. The type of people who review are twofold - fans of the book wanting to enthuse about it, or people who feel like they didn’t get the experience they wanted and want to say that. Sometimes those people are reasonable in reviews, sometimes they just slap a 1 star on it and move on.