"Age Appropriate"

Hello! Today I'm going to talk about something I really care about: books. This whole train of thought was inspired by a long list of books I saved from a Page-A-Day calendar of book reviews from 2013. I figured it was time to go through the list and decide which ones I still wanted to read-then figure out if my school and public libraries have them, make color coded lists, and plan which ones I wanted to read first. You know, just normal, bookworm stuff.

I ended up going on Goodreads to get a sense of what regular readers thought of these books, and also to see which of them would be (for lack of a better term) age appropriate. I've been reading at a college level since second or third grade, so I've never encountered a (fictional) book I didn't understand, but if I'm going to read an "adult" book, I want to know if it's rated adult because of its complexity or the gratuitous and graphic sex scenes.

I didn't really think this was an unreasonable request, but after poking around on the Goodreads site for a while, I found that the idea had been discussed by users years ago and (as far as I can tell) scrapped. In fact, a lot of people on the forum seemed extremely offended at the thought of people telling them what they can and cannot read. I was kind of confused by this, so I went and looked at other sites. I couldn't find a single website that offered useful appropriateness ratings for books. Basically, everything said either "Adult" or "Young Adult," with no explanation for the rating.

Then, I understood. People seem to think that the only reason a human would want to know what kind of content is in a book is if they are a parent trying to prevent their child from being exposed to the world. Has it never occurred to anyone that there are teenagers who aren't interested in reading about sex, violence, and half the other things these reviews are telling our parents about? Why not just tell us?

As I looked even further, I started getting a little frustrated. After almost an hour of searching, I hadn't found any useful information about the content in any of the books I wanted to check. It's done with movies, isn't it? Not only are there official ratings assigned to movies, I can also go on hundreds of different websites to get information about exactly what kinds of potentially inappropriate material is in a movie I want to watch, then make my own, educated decision about whether or not to watch it. Why isn't there that much thought and effort put into rating books in a similar way? (End rant.)

So, what do you guys think? I'd love to continue this conversation in the comments, and if anyone knows of a website like I'm describing, please let me know! Also, if anyone knows how to design a website so we can just make this happen on our own, that would be great.