Interesting reply, /u/commenter_on_reddit. I agree with the main thrust of your post, but there are a couple of things you said I want to respond to.
reviewing and rating books is a side activity to actual reading
Agreed! And that is what I think reviewing and rating should be: a side activity. I may not have expressed myself clearly, but what I wanted to say was that GoodReads seems to be conditioning readers to regard this as the central or primary objective.
Most of the reviews and discussions I encountered were not of the sort which explored the question, "What did this book mean?" or "What was this book about?" or "What was the author trying to express?" but rather "So did you personally like or dislike it?"
And I am not saying that the subjective experience of the reader is unimportant. I am saying that, ideally, this should be suspended until the book has been properly understood. Judgement follows evaluation, but the value of the judgement is equal to the depth of the evaluation.
It's the blurb I'd write on the blank back cover of the book if I owned it.
Again, yes, ideally. But these are not the kind of reviews that prevail. In most of them (in obedience to the founding assumption that the reader's immediate personal reaction is of primary interest) the pronouns I and my are used more often than "the book," "the author," "the plot," "the characters."
I absorb the nutrients I was deficient in and the remainder of the book shoots right through me.
Charming analogy! :-D
What sort of books do you read, if you don't mind my asking, that you're fully immersed in the text but unaware of your enjoyment of it?
But you're ignoring what I actually said! I didn't say I was "unaware of my enjoyment" but,
books do give enjoyment and we do finish them with personal view about how enjoyable they were. I just have serious doubts that that should be the goal of reading.
To improve upon that second sentence, what I mean is: Our level of enjoyment should not be the measure of a book's worth or the starting point for every discussion because enjoyment is often relative to comprehension AND comprehension is sort of stymied when we make enjoyment the last court of appeal in evaluating books.