Booking Through Thursday: Rating

A meme from Booking Through Thursday.

Today’s topic is “Movies have a rating system to help guide the consumer weed out adult/violent/inappropriate kinds of films. Video games do, too. Do you think BOOKS should have a ratings system?”

The rating systems for movies and video games tend to be arbitrary and unreliable. You can almost anybody and they can name a number of items that they like regardless of their rating. We try to categorize things so that people don’t have to think. No, I do not think that books should have ratings. Too many people try to judge a movie, a game, or a book based on the language or the fact that there is sex without consideration for how it is discussed. Everything is about context and when we try to rate things and put them into big pretty boxes we remove that context and over simplify. A great many wonderful stories are missed because a person gets hung up on a single aspect.