How much I like novels compared to other people.

Ever since the beginning of 2011 I've been giving a rating out of 100 for each novel I've read. I also thought it would be interesting to take the average Goodreads rating out of 5, convert it to a score out of 100 and compare this Goodreads rating to my own ratings. Here is the chart:

The blue dots represent each novel, a total of 323 novels. The x axis is my rating, the y axis is the average Goodreads rating. Hence, on the far left, my lowest rated novel I gave 6 out of 100, and if you read off the Goodreads value, it is 67 out of 100. Note also that the y axis starts at 50. That's because no Goodread average rating was less than 50.

The red dotted line is a trend line. It slightly slopes upward from left to right. This means that there is a positive correlation between how much I enjoy a novel on average, and how much the average person enjoys it. However, it appears to be a weak correlation. Indeed, the worst novel that I rated at 6, and my best novel rated at 89, have the very same Goodreads rating of 67! This suggests I really shouldn't take much notice of average customer readings at all.

My average rating is 57, but the average Goodreads rating is 80 (4 stars)! This means that Goodreads (and indeed Amazon) ratings are grossly inflated and therefore unreliable. I mean naively one might suppose that score of 80 or 4 stars means a novel is pretty good. But that is merely an average rating. To be in the top quarter of all novels a Goodreads rating needs to be 84/100 or 4.2 stars. So a big difference from 80 or 4 stars (better than half of all books), to 84 or 4.2 stars (better than three-quarters of all books).  This from the xkcd webcomic is appropriate.

As a matter of further interest, my average rating for male novelists is 58 and for females it is 55.  For the average Goodreads reader the figures are identical at 80.