Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

How To Rate A Book: Goodreads, Taste, And Reading In The 21st Century, Dylan Burns

Library Faculty & Staff Presentations

“What shall the individual who still desires to read attempt to read this late in history?” asks Harold Bloom. Writing at the end of the 20^th century, Bloom’s quote anticipates the information explosion that the age of the internet brought to the reader (even if his emphasis is on the unpopularity of reading rather than the explosion in options). Social media sites like Goodreads prove that reading is still popular, yet Bloom’s question of what does someone read is still salient. More than ever, reading is a social activity, to be shared, debated, and justified between millions of would …