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 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 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...
9 comments
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more