The books you read define you as a person

How social media, influencers and ratings help make a better you

Thomas Reddington

May 04, 2025

What makes a “good” book?

Is it style? Or plot? Maybe the characters? What about how it made you feel?

WRONG!!!

Depending on your age a good book is one of two things:

Over 30
The only thing that matters is 4 plus rating on Goodreads. Please ensure you conform to the groupthink. Reading anything with a lower star rating means that you are an intellectually stunted and tasteless buffoon. If you do pick up lower rated read and dare to actually enjoy it, you should immediately don a burlap sack and go and live in a field with the rest of the animals.

Under 30
A good book is whatever you are told to like by your echo chamber of identikit influencers who probably haven’t even opened the damn thing. What you read is just another performative act to consolidate your social media brand. All hail BookTok!

I hope you have found this clarification useful. You can now go back to your reading “choices” with a renewed sense of purpose. Remember companies have spent a lot of time and money using the internet to tell you how to think and what to buy — you wouldn’t want to seem ungrateful now, would you?

An example of an aspirational image you could post on your social media so people think you are deep. Make sure you buy The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli in hardback for maximum impact.

Wait, are you still here?

Fair enough, let me be real for a moment.

External pressures have created a toxic and performative reading culture where what you read defines you as a person — in this culture a good book is one that makes you look good (mostly to strangers online).

This should be reversed — who you are as a person and how you feel in the moment defines what you will enjoy reading.

So I guess you want to circle back to…

What really makes a good book?

First of all there is the objectively good. Something that is well written — good on a technical level. But then there is also the subjectively good. What really matters is that a book is good for you.

Not every 5 star masterpiece is going to do it for you; whereas after a long day getting lost in some some pulp fiction adventure might. Different people enjoy different things, and people enjoy different things at different times.

True reading pleasure is subjective and personal. We should worry less about the external optics of the books we read and just get lost in something we enjoy reading.

We should also acknowledge that homogenised rating systems and corporately sponsored influencers are entirely inappropriate places to look if the question is “what book will I enjoy next?”

With Verse we are trying to answer this question by offering an alternative way to find recommendations that are relevant to your tastes and interests (powered by real people, not algorithms or paid publicity). This is why we’re not focusing on ratings — they are often meaningless to you.

In the spirit of “a good book is a good book for you”, here are some books that I have really enjoyed regardless of how well they might be rated:

For people who want more from their reading

Our reading experiences: Real readers, real books, real impact

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