Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme that was originally created and hosted by Rukky @ Eternity Books and was co-hosted with Dani @ Literary Lion until March 2022. In April 2022, the meme became hosted by Aria @ Book Nook Bits and has been co-hosted by Dini @ Dini Panda Reads since the start of 2025! 🥰

Essentially, there is a discussion prompt every Friday for us to answer that’s usually something bookish! The prompt this week was “A Change in Bookish Opinion”. I’ve decided to talk less about a change in my opinion and more about what to do when when you have a change in opinion like that. Specifically – should you ever change the rating you give a book years after the fact?

This blog is only about a month old, but I’ve had a couple of book blogs before and I started my first one back in 2016/2016. I was 14 years old. And I’ve had my Goodreads account even longer – since I was 13. I’m now 23, I’ve had the account over 10 years, and obviously my taste in books has changed.

So what should I do about all the ratings and reviews I gave books that I read ten years ago? It’s not like I was reading children’s books – lots of YA, but a fair bit of general fiction and classics etc. as well – but my opinion about the same kind of books has inevitably changed.

The good thing with Goodreads (one of the only good things… hence why I mostly use Storygraph now) is that there are dates on the reviews (although in some places changing the star rating will also change the date). Regardless, to make it extra clear, I have been trying to go through and write the year the review was written at the beginning of the review if it’s from a while ago. This also helps if I ever reread a book, so that the correct opinions are allocated to the correct read of the book.

I don’t delete any long, detailed or thought-out reviews I’ve written. Especially of YA books, since I think the opinions of teenaged Keira there is actually probably the most valid one (or at least the most applicable one to the target audience). However, I feel differently about star ratings.

For one thing, although my opinion might have changed, with the way a review works, there is some kind of explanation and reasoning going on. Star ratings, however, are very up to interpretation – for some people, 4 stars is an okay book, for some it’s an excellent book etc. etc. And not only has my taste changed, the way I rate books has changed too.

Over the last decade of rating books, I’ve gone from giving out loads of 4 and 5 stars, to being really excessively harsh, to finding a happy medium now where I feel like my star ratings are a good balance of objectivity and subjectivity. I also make a point to include a star rating explanation on my blog so that we’re all on the same page, if anyone were to ever question a rating I gave.

I also choose not to rate books that I don’t think are rate-able according to the same rubric as other books I rate – I’m unlikely to give a picture book 5 stars unless it was miraculously world-changing, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t 5-star worthy as reading material for a 3 year old. In that case, I write a review but don’t rate it – because for me, the ratings are a way for me to quickly refer back to a year and see which books were my favourite, but I equally don’t want to put anyone off what could be a genuinely good book. And there’s a good chance the picture book was never going to be my favourite, even if I might be going out and buying it for all the babies in my life (if there were any – currently in a bit of a babyless circle haha).

One argument for keeping the ratings as they were is to leave a sort of time capsule of your opinion on certain books at certain times. That could be an interesting approach too, if it weren’t for my 17ish self.

At 17, I went through a phase of thinking I thought harsh ratings were a good thing (not harsh reviews – this is an important distinction – I wasn’t saying good books were bad, I was saying 2 stars was still a good rating… which I think most people would disagree with). I’m still fairly stingy with my 5 stars, but not nearly as bad as I was at the time (hehe). The worst thing was, though, that because (like now) I wanted my star ratings to reflect my up-to-date opinions on the books I’d read, I went through a bunch of books on Goodreads and changed my ratings. So I don’t actually know what rating I originally gave a lot of the books.

Unfortunately, since I don’t agree my 17-year-old self’s rating system, they’re outdated ratings anyway as well as not reflecting my opinion at the time of reading the book. It didn’t really matter much for the last five years where I’ve been taking a break from blogging (especially since I mostly use Storygraph anyway), but now that I’m starting again, I want my Goodreads to be a bit more accurate again – and not unfairly harsh towards authors and books that were actually pretty good. The only issue is that a lot of the books were read in 2015-2017.

That’s a problem because it’s 10 years ago, but also because I read so many books then that I can’t remember a lot of them (well enough) to make my mind up what rating they should actually have. So instead what I’ve done is rate the ones that I do still remember and have definite opinions on based on my current opinion and get rid of the rating (but not review) altogether of the other books since I don’t think I can assign a rating for a book I have a hazy recollection of at best.

The ratings where they are still there are definitely harsher than I probably gave at the time, but no more than 1 star unless something really bad happened between now and then to make me hate the book (usually a reread that changed my mind about the book). Also, the distribution of the books isn’t that dissimilar to my more recent years (if we ignore the unrated books), which makes me think they’re probably reasonably fair. Although of course some years are more positive than others. Definitely not as harsh as 17-year-old Keira though haha – I do now think a 2 star review is negative, after all.

Some could probably go up again upon a reread, but I’m generally pretty happy with how they are now – it feels like a good balance between my current feelings and feelings at the time of reading the book, whilst not giving false ratings to books where I don’t really know how I feel about the book still (even if I remember the plot vaguely). If I ever return to those books, I’ll give them a rating, but most of them are books I have since passed down to my sister or donated — I’ve moved house a good few times since 2016/2017 and inevitably had to get rid of lots of books each time, although I still have a ridiculous number (800+ hehe, what can I say? I’m a book dragon…). So it’s unlikely. But never say never!

Of course, for the most accurate ratings, you should check out my Storygraph instead of my Goodreads – I think we’ve all probably given up on half stars from Goodreads at this point. I don’t use quarter stars or even all the half stars because it scatters my graph too much (hehe), but I do use 2.5 and 3.5 – I use 3.5 a lot actually. It’s probably my most common rating.

Okay I checked and it’s actually not for all time (since 2020, most books from before then aren’t on my Storygraph), but it is my most common rating this year. I only recently started giving 2.5 stars again so that’s why 2.5 is so low – might need to re-jig some of the ratings there too now that I have that as an option again…

Question Time

Anyway, this was a bit of a rambly post, so I’ll end it here with a question to you:

What do you do if your opinion about books changes? If you publish your bookish opinions for the world to see, do you think you should keep those opinions up-to-date, or should you leave them as they were at the time when you read the book?

Thank you for pushing through this somewhat chaotic discussion post – I promise the next one will be more organised!

Keira x