This may be slightly cheating, as they’re both based on short stories, but After Yang and Drive My Car are both so massively better than their source material. Everything Alexander Weinstein writes feels pretty unremarkable to me as far as sci-fi goes, but After Yang builds upon his work beautifully. Drive My Car is especially astonishing as a work of adaptation in the way it takes a handful of middling (unrelated to each other) Murakami stories and stitches them together into one of the best screenplays of recent years. The screenwriters take the best elements of Murakami’s work and pair them with elements that fill in the gaps of his failings.

Lee Chang-dong’s Burning is another great adaptation of a Murakami short story, but the story that’s based upon may actually be my favorite of Murakami’s, and it’s one I feel stands alone much more strongly than those that inspired the Drive My Car film.

I don’t listen to redditors’ aggregate opinions on books, either.

Matt Haig. Well, kinda. The Midnight Library was okay, and it has enough good in it for me to want to read another of his. I’m glad I did, because I liked The Humans a ton more. His quirks just work better in that than in TML. I was like, “Okay, I kinda get your deal, Matt Haig.”

But I eventually got around to reading How to Stop Time, and it was really not good. Easily the weakest of the three. Whatever problems TML had, this one has in higher supply, and while that novel at least had its affecting emotional moments and the undercurrent of something genuine, this one made me feel close to nothing.

So I guess I’m glad I gave Haig a second chance, but maybe I should have stopped short of a third chance.

It’s really funny that people seem to be polarized into either the Piranesi camp or the Strange & Norrell camp. I seldom see people love both or hate both.

It kinda makes sense, the books were written decades apart and bear very little resemblance to one another, so you can’t make a judgment on one based on the other.

I’d consider the 4 range many of his books are in to be quite a high rating. The only books that get much higher are either canonized classics or hyper-wide-appeal Reese’s Book Club type books, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a badge of honor for a contemporary book to have millions of ratings and a 4.5 average.

If a book has under a 3, then yeah I’ll probably take Goodreads’ word for it. But I’ve read plenty of great stuff with averages in the low to mid 3 range, let alone closer to 4. It’s not a bad place to be, it just means it wasn’t designed to appeal to every single person that comes across it, which isn’t what you should want out of a book anyways.

The mean and median are two different things. They are two different ways to measure the “average.” If it’s clear from context that a question would be better answered with the median, it’s not a great transgression to give that value. (Yes, in certain mathematical contexts we tend to use “average” synonymously with “mean” unless specified otherwise, but we’re in the world of casual speech right now anyhow.)

But to your original comment, you’re absolutely right, OP is thinking of “median” when they are asking this question, but the data they are getting is the mean.

Yeah, so I can lend them to others!