Recently I read Nabokov’s Pale Fire for the first time. I was on a long train journey, and long train journeys are ideal for reading; so I launched into Nabokov’s strange tale of poets and Zemblan monarchs-in-exile and hired assassins and madmen. It is a deeply strange, sometimes funny, often maddening, fearsomely clever and—I confess—not altogether likeable hall-of-mirrors of a book. But as I don’t demand that the books that I read should be likeable, I persevered to the end, and I was glad that I did. There are many worse ways that you can spend a long train journey than reading Pale Fire.

Anyway, after I finished the book, I went on over to GoodReads.com to announce to anybody who cared—in the way that one does—that I had read it. I put Pale Fire on my list of books, and as is usual I was prompted to give it a star rating, from one to five stars…

But at this point, I hesitated. How many stars? I hovered my mouse uncertainly over those yellow stars. In the helpful popups that appeared as my mouse wavered on the screen, I was given the following choices: one star for “didn’t like it”; two stars for “it was OK”; three stars for “liked it”; four stars for “really liked it”; and five stars for “it was amazing”. And although I probably shouldn’t think so hard about these things (it is what comes from being a philosopher, I guess), I just could not decide how many stars to give the book.

My first problem was this: I really wasn’t sure whether I liked Pale Fire or not. In some ways, I really liked it. In some ways, I didn’t like it at all. I found it a slow and confusing slog. I found it maddening. I found it wonderful and brilliant.

There was, however, a deeper problem that only came to light when I thought a bit more about the star-rating system. “It was OK” (two stars) and “it was amazing” (five stars) seemed to me to refer to apparently objective judgements (or, to be Kantian about it, subjectively universal judgements of taste, but let’s not get into that). On the other hand “liked it” (three stars), “really liked it” (four stars) and “didn’t like it” (one star) seemed to refer to purely personal and subjective responses to the book. So it was not at all clear that there was even a single scale on which to evaluate the book.

The more I thought about it, the more the problems of giving stars to Nabokov seemed to multiply. When I then recalled all the books that I most admire, I realised that not all of them are books I like—as I said, I don’t demand that books be likeable. So I admire Kant’s Critique of Judgement, for example; but I don’t exactly plunge into it with joyful abandon; and many of the books that have moved or impressed or affected me the most are books that I’ve found, in the reading of them, a little bit, well, boring (as, I confess, I found Pale Fire a little bit boring). But should boredom be such a problem as all that? Readers, I think, are far too allergic to being bored. Sometimes being bored is necessary in a book. Boredom surfaces, you continue reading, you sit out the boredom, and suddenly you find yourself engaged again. Or even if you don’t, by the time you get to the end, perhaps you see that above and beyond the boredom, there were other things going on, things that you did not see at the time. On my top-list of boring but nevertheless wonderful books are these: Notre-Dame de Paris; Moby Dick; Pale Fire, perhaps; anything by Husserl… And whether I’m bored at not in the reading of a book is not the most interesting question to ask, nor should it be the final word on whether the book is worthwhile.

So my mouse dithered for a while more. Should I go for the happy medium? Three stars for Nabokov? Heavens! What would people think of me? Now the pressures of social embarrassment started to kick in. I couldn’t lose face by giving Nabokov three stars: wasn’t that simply an admission that I was irredeemably philistine? But could I really go along with the consensus and give it five stars? After all, as I have said, at times I really didn’t like it.

The indecision persisted for some time; but eventually—because philosophical questions are more often solved by the fact that philosophers get peckish and want to move on to something else, than they are solved by some Damascene dawning of the light—I decided that life was too short and I should plump for a safe four stars.

Four stars for Pale Fire? I can’t say that I am happy with the decision, but the decision stands. And yet, the more I think about this culture of rating, these stars that we hand out for music and art and performances and restaurants and books, the more I doubt that it is of any value at all, the more I wonder if it says anything useful, the more I suspect that it flattens out our complex, rich and multiple experience of reading into something banal and vacuous.

Having said this, if anybody who reads this is also over on GoodReads.com, I’d be much obliged if you give my books five stars…