Faraway, So Close: Seeing the Intimacy in Goodreads Reviews

Abstract

Book reviews written by readers and published on digital sites such as Goodreads are a new force in contemporary book culture. This article uses feminist standpoint theory to investigate the language used in Goodreads reviews to better understand how these reviewers articulate intimate reading experiences. A total of 692 reviews of seven bestselling fiction and nonfiction books are analyzed by two methods. The first, thematic content analysis, involves close reading of the reviews. The second, sentiment analysis, is an automated “distant reading” process. These methods prompt us, as researchers, to reflect on the way they foster or inhibit a sense of proximity to readers, even as they reveal predominant features of Goodreads reviews. Together, the methods reveal that 86.1% of Goodreads reviews describe a reading experience, and 68% specifically mention an emotional reaction to the book, with the emotion most intense in reviews of fiction. Reviews also create social connections by mentioning other readers, authors, characters, and people from the reviewer’s life. Through their emotional language and sociality, Goodreads reviews present distinctive, intimate reading practices, constituting a new cultural phenomenon, and a unique opportunity for investigation.

The transnational reception of bestselling books between Canada and Australia

“…This generic distinctiveness is perhaps most apparent in the personal, emotional tone of many reader reviews. Elsewhere, we have analysed the Goodreads reviews among our dataset and we found that a high proportion of them depicted intimate experiences of reading and passionate reactions to books (Driscoll, 2016; Driscoll and Rehberg Sedo, 2019). Across our full dataset of reader reviews, 74 per cent expressed an emotional reaction to the book.…”

Wattpad as a resource for literary studies. Quantitative and qualitative examples of the importance of digital social reading and readers’ comments in the margins

“…This is an interesting phenomenon that requires further investigation to understand the relation between textual features and reader response. Previous research using sentiment analysis on online reviews showed that they are characterised by "intimacy", inasmuch as the expression of emotions is one of the main feature of the verbalisation of reader response online [116,117]. However, the correlation with other kinds of textual features is still unclear.…”

Captivating, splendid or instructive?

“…What these publications have in common is that they have made visible aspects of reading behaviour that have been largely hidden up to now. Driscoll and Rehberg Sedo (2019) combine (manual) content analysis with (machine) sentiment analysis in their investigation of emotion and sociality in Goodreads reviews. Their study is close to ours in the sense that they are interested in aspects of the reading experience (they code for temporal, intellectual, emotional and physical aspects) that are related to the aspects that we look at.…”