Score

The avg rating of MK has gone up a notch and is 3.02 now.
Is it possible to remove books from this list? Great Gluten-Free Baking's rating is now too high.

Matt wrote: "The avg rating of MK has gone up a notch and is 3.02 now.
Is it possible to remove books from this list? Great Gluten-Free Baking's rating is now too high."

Good catch! GGFB is now off the list.

I had never performed this operation before. For the benefit of people who have led similarly sheltered lives, you get a warning saying that incorrect deletion of books could have serious consequences. I wondered what they were; unfortunately, no further information was provided.

The rating of MK has gone up again (now at 3.03).
What's wrong with people??? No books on this list are affected.

Matt wrote: "The rating of MK has gone up again (now at 3.03).

Thank you, I have edited the text.

What's wrong with people???"

Well, Putin is trending, and I think that naturally tends to increase Hitler's popularity a little. If he manages to end the Syrian civil war by killing everyone who doesn't support Assad, I predict another small rise here.

I see the situation in Syria with increasing concern. Often there are only small things that can lead to a big disaster. if I imagine that Russian, American, and who knows what else fighter jets fly next to each other there ...

I know, it's a complete disaster. The list of unpleasant consequences of the Iraq War just keeps getting longer and longer. And I'm sure we're not done yet.

Didn't it ever occur to George W. Bush that there was maybe a reason why the US had been supporting Saddam Hussein's evil, corrupt regime, and left it in place even after Kuwait? I mean, you'd have thought his father could have explained it to him in words of one syllable?

This last comment reminds me of Mark Knopfler's song Don't Crash the Ambulance :)

http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/35...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1axx...

The rating of MK is still on the rise (3.06). Again, no books affected.

The "Worst Rated Books on Goodreads" list ( https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/2... ) has quite a few books rated below 3.06 that aren't on this list.

The average rating is still rising! Now at 3.12. With a total of 23274 ratings, I figure it needed quite a few 4- and 5-star-rarings to raise the average by 1/100.

I see 4354 5-star ratings and 4779 4-star ratings.

I had to take a look at some of the 4-star reviews. A surprising proportion of them are written in Arabic script (I'm afraid I can't reliably distinguish between Arabic, Farsi and Urdu). I quite liked the opening sentence from 'Alex':

The book is helpful in coming to an understanding of how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader.

Manny wrote: "I can't reliably distinguish between Arabic, Farsi and Urdu"

The "S3.Google Translate" add-on for Firefox is quite helpful in cases like this. After selecting text and telling the add-on to guess the source language it'll show you which language that is.
It also has a text-to-speech feature.

That sounds useful! But hm, Chrome must surely have a similar feature somewhere?

Manny wrote: "That sounds useful! But hm, Chrome must surely have a similar feature somewhere?"

Indeed.The add-on is called "Google Translate" and is availabale in the Chrome Web Store:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/de...
It works very similar than the Firefox add-on, but has less features.

Matt wrote: "The average rating is still rising! Now at 3.12. With a total of 23274 ratings, I figure it needed quite a few 4- and 5-star-rarings to raise the average by 1/100."

Six months passed and there are now 25,151 ratings and the average has gone up again to 3.13 :(

This is not an encouraging trend :(

average has gone up to 3.19 :/

Looking at the book's home page, I find that "70% of people liked it".

I find that I am shocked. Evidently I am very naive.

Manny wrote: "I know, it's a complete disaster. The list of unpleasant consequences of the Iraq War just keeps getting longer and longer. And I'm sure we're not done yet.

Didn't it ever occur to George W. Bush that there was maybe a reason why the US had been supporting Saddam Hussein's evil, corrupt regime, and left it in place even after Kuwait? I mean, you'd have thought his father could have explained it to him in words of one syllable?"

I wish we could "like" comments.

the Fifty Shades books, Downside Up, and the LE THEATRE books need to be removed (for the time being?)

Yes, we evidently have an optimist here...

lots of books that shouldn’t be here, like fifty shades, OITNB, and many others.