Comment by owenversteeg

Any broadly used ratings system is total garbage. Goodreads ratings, Google Maps ratings, Amazon reviews, Vivino for wine, et cetera. Even assuming the reviews are real and genuine, most people just aren’t good at writing reviews, and the handful that are often have wildly different criteria than you. Someone already commented with one enthusiast site - and sure, enthusiast sites are often better than the mainstream option (see also: CellarTracker for wine) but honestly my advice is to get good at determining the quality of the thing yourself. For books there are a ton of hints about what you’ll be getting. “NYT Bestseller”, “xyz book club”, certain publishers, who’s quoted on the back, when was it published, who wrote it? All of those things can help you rapidly identify books. I personally dislike most modern books and prefer the “classics”, so a lot of this is only useful as a negative signal, but even then there are positive signals, for example a reference to a much older book.