Yeah, I’m not suggesting that Goodreads ratings are an example of the best way to encapsulate a book’s worth, but it as good a way as any to glimpse a simple thumb up/down opinion for a broad cross-section of the population. It’s easy to see on Goodreads that there’s a lot of punitive downvoting that goes on with assigned classics. You seldom see this with regular “popular” books.

This is a super common response to reading the “classics” in school. See e.g., Goodreads, and note how reviews for classics invariably are lower than thousands of objectively worse books. There are many reasons, but mainly because schools assign classics, which means you have lots of people reading something because they HAVE to and not because they WANT to. Nobody likes that.

Also: (1) Not everyone subjectively likes the same books, even great books. (2) Not everyone has enough reading experience/age/social-historical perspective to appreciate some classics. (3) A lot of classics are tragedies, and lots of people don’t want to read to be bummed out. And (4) some classics are dated and are taught today at least partly because of inertia.

Thus, I can predict (without checking beforehand) that The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Middlemarch, A Hundred Years of Solitude, and most other “great books” almost certainly have much lower Goodreads reviews than the latest Brandon Sanderson “Cosmere” book.