Skip to main content

Book rating system

This is the book rating system I used in my old reviews. I stopped assigning stars to books some time ago, because they were subjective and largely arbitrary. (I still assign them in my reading log, based on the likelihood of me rereading the book).

I rate books first and foremost on reading pleasure and ability to draw one into the story (i.e. on the level of escapism they offer). Technique, such as plot, characters, dialogue, etc., is an important consideration: I like plots to be solid, characters to be believable and dialogue natural, so if the plot is full of holes, the characters flat and the dialogue stilted, I generally don't enjoy a book, although if only one of these things is present, I may enjoy it but give it a lower rating.

I don't take into consideration what others think of the book or if it's classified as High Literature, Classic, Trash or something else. For the most part I leave the judgement of fine literary merit to academics and professional reviewers.

I am generally pretty good at judging which books I am going to like, so I rarely end up reading a less than 2 star book unless I come across a highly recommended must-read book that everyone else loves but I hate.

I opted for the 5 star system, as it seems to be the most common, and therefore the one most people are familiar with.

These are my criteria for giving star ratings to books:

5 stars: excellent, perfect or nearly perfect, must read, will probably keep it, will probably read it again (although see notes)
4 stars: good, highly recommended, a few flaws, strong contender for the keeper shelf, strong possibility that I will re-read it
3 stars: a decent read, nothing earth-shattering, several flaws, might re-read but will probably not
2 stars: mediocre, dull or badly flawed, would not read it again, sorry I bought it
1 star: waste of time, sorry I bought it, sorry I read it
0 stars: I want my money back and a reimbursement for the time wasted reading it

A plus (+) after a number means the book is not quite good enough for the next class above.

Notes:
Strangely enough, many of my favourite re-reads are four star books. Some of the 5 star ones are just too perfect to be read more than once, like when the plot hinges on the revelation of something, the pre-knowledge of which makes the book dull or uninteresting - but of course there are also 5 star books that I re-read periodically.

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme