What if every book was worth reading? Not just the books with silver medallions on their covers, but every hardcover featured at Barnes & Noble, every paperback foisted upon you by a friend or a relative or even a stranger—what if they were all pretty good? That’s the sense one gets from Book Marks, a new “Rotten Tomatoes for Books” launched Tuesday by the literary culture site Lit Hub. Unlike Rotten Tomatoes, which determines if a review is “fresh” (red tomato) or “rotten” (splattered green tomato) and assigns a percentage score, Lit Hub uses an A-F grading system. But none of the books are remotely in danger of flunking.

The reviews themselves have been pulled from 70 publications, including The New Republic, but only a few have been graded below a B-: Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Eligible, the Prep author’s take on Pride and Prejudice, is one—it got a C+; Emily Winslow’s memoir Jane Doe January, about the 20-year search for the man who raped her, is another—it got a C, based on three middling reviews. Both Elena Ferrante’s The Story of The Lost Child, perhaps the most acclaimed work of fiction published in the U.S. in 2015, and Andrew Nagorski’s The Nazi Hunters, a dad book about Nazi hunters, have A grades. Whereas Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s masterpiece Secondhand Time has an A-, Steve Hamilton’s thriller The Second Life of Nick Mason is one of four books to have earned an A+. Even Moby’s memoir, Porcelain, got a B-.

That is, nearly all of the more than 100 books graded by Book Marks seem to be worth reading, which renders it somewhat useless as a recommendation resource, which wasn’t lost on many of its early readers. But that’s not how Lit Hub editor-in-chief Jonny Diamond pitches the site anyway.

“One of the central purposes of Book Marks is to draw attention to all the great critical writing about books happening in the country today, to create an easily searchable resource that reflects the current state of literary criticism,” Diamond told me. “We also hope that it will help elevate worthy books that receive strong accolades but do not have big marketing budgets behind them and might otherwise be overlooked. Finally, we hope that readers will benefit from Book Marks, using it to discover books that they will find interesting and rewarding.”



What if the problem, then, isn’t that Book Marks insufficiently separates the great books from the mediocre ones? If it is doing exactly what it was designed to do—reflecting the current state of literary criticism—then the real problem is that literary criticism, like America’s universities, is suffering from severe grade inflation.