'Other people might like it. I just didn’t'

GoodReads.com offers a place where readers can review and rate the books they have read. More than before, cultural audiences can thus express the interpretations and evaluations in public.. In this thesis, I use these expressions to study how readers created meaning in an online social network. Previous research has predominantly focused on cultural consumption patterns and its relation to social status and cultural classification, on the one hand, and on the use of aesthetic criteria by professional critics, on the other hand. I adopt a qualitative approach in researching meaning as well as value of readers actively seeks to bridge the gap between meaning making and value attribution. This study aims to research in what way reviewers on GoodReads make sense, evaluate, and relate to what they read. By studying 238 reviews of bestseller and prizewinner books, it will become apparent that meaning making touches upon three dimensions, each of these dimension delving deeper into the core of the reviews. First, we will see the great variety in which reviewers contextualise their opinion. Most reviewers offer a reflexive context so their readers can make sense of the review. Simultaneously, this leads to a form of distinction and classification: prizewinner reviews state their experience and knowledge, place the books in a wider literary context and mention the relativity of taste. Bestseller reviewers on the other hand, are more clear-cut in their aesthetic criteria, due to the genre-expectations they have. Second, the motivation to read books is closely related to the way readers appreciate different aspects of a book. A need for escapism in reading bestseller books for example, leads to a great appreciation and demand for the build-up of a clear plot. Third, the tone reviewers use to evaluate a book, using either more distant or more personal aesthetic criteria, vocalises a more technical or literal understanding of the book. It will become apparent that in researching online reviews, therefore concentrating on readers’ agency instead of mere readers’ consumption, we gain a better understanding in how people make sense of what they read and that indeed, reading bestseller books is experienced differently from reading prizewinning books.