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I have never professed to be a critic. I am one tree in a forest of individuals who choose to exercise the right of free speech online to discuss books. What I strive to do, and what I believe other book bloggers strive to do, is to communicate my experience with a given book in such a manner that anyone reading one of my reviews can assess whether or not they want to try it out for themselves. I try to do so with passion and creativity, but in the end what I do is every bit as subjective as you would expect the opinion of an enthusiastic book lover to be. In the end you, as a unique individual, are rolling the dice anytime you pick up a book on the recommendation of another reader.
I also acknowledge the fact that I often write lengthy reviews and not everyone has the time, or wants to take the time, to read every word. Understanding that, I generally give books a star rating so a person can see at a glance what I thought of the book. I use a 5 star rating system and I have become increasingly unhappy with it because I don’t feel like that gives me enough range to rate books that are worth reading. I also have a habit of rating in .25 increments in order to force a greater range within that 5 point scale, but it feels a bit false. So, I’ve decided to adopt the 10 point rating system of the Classic Science Fiction Book Club that I have recently joined online.
Their rating system is:
10 = One of the best books I have ever read
9 = Terrific; couldn’t put it down
8 = Very good
7 = Good
6 = Enjoyed parts of it
5 = I didn’t particularly like it or dislike it, mixed review
4 = An “okay” book, but I don’t recommend it
3 = Poor, lost interest
2 = Don’t waste your time;
1 = Awful; didn’t finish it;
0 = One of the worst books I have ever read
This list was created by Jim Wallace Harris and John Grayshaw. I like it because it gives me the chance to rate a book a 7, perhaps even a 6, and have you as a fellow reader understand that this book is potentially worth picking up even though it did not “Wow” me the same way an 8, 9, or 10 rated book did. I also like the idea of using it because it will coincide with the ratings I give books read for the book club.
I don’t know if it will make any difference whatsoever, but I am excited about making this small tweak to my reviewing process.
So the question posed in the title of this post remains, how do you rate? A year from now when it comes time to do my 2011 Year in Review I will be interested in assessing whether or not I felt this change made any difference.
And before I close, allow me to use this public forum to once again say how much I appreciate the other passionate individuals who review books on personal, and other, blog sites and those of you who share your book passions in comments. I have rolled the dice with you many a time and have almost always come up a winner.
Looks like your new scale is pretty close to mine, except I rate on a scale of one to five, with half-stars in the mix:
5+ stars – easily one of my favourite books of all time
5 stars – loved it to the point of incoherence
4.5 stars – loved the hell out of it
4 stars – loved it
3.5 stars – really liked it
3 stars – liked it
2.5 stars – may or may not have actively disliked it, but certainly had some major problems with it
2 stars – actively disliked it and/or found it too boring to connect with
1.5 stars – hated its guts and/or was bored out of my mind
1 star – was tempted to kill it and do despicable things to the corpse
0.5 stars – let’s just say that the above is not as low as I can go
It’s been years since I read a 1- or 0.5-star book, so I’m not entirely sure I’ve settled on the right criteria for those rankings. I feel like I may have been too harsh.
cool. i’ve been rating out of 7 because 5 just doesn’t seem like enough. Did you join the yahoo group? i’ve been in the one there called ClassicSciFi for a while. Enjoy!
All of your comments about the Classic Science Fiction Club has me interested. I just put in a request to join.
I like the rating system. I might adopt it for my blog.
Jim Black: Great, glad to see you joined. Definitely your sort of group. It will be fun to have you over there.
Melanie: I see you joined as well, yay!!! Make sure you both share a little about yourselves with the group.
Memory: I’m not sure I’ve ever read a 0 or 1 book. If anything was striking me that poorly I quit reading it. I’m not the kind of person who feels the need to suffer through a book just to finish it.
Actually, as far as I know, the group’s creator and original moderator came up with the system. Her name was Colleen Morse.
I too like the system, but I find I’m too easy a rater. I’ve never given anything less than a 3. Even books I lose interest in and don’t finish, I might give decent ratings because I can’t help but take into account that it’s an all right book, just nothing I’m interested in.
On the other hand I’m known as a fairly harsh critic that has no qualms about tearing a book apart in my reviews, so I guess it kind of balances out.
John G: I wasn’t sure when I posted that, but since you and James were mentioned at the end of it I gave you the credit.
I’m not a really harsh critic very often, but that is because I rarely read anything start to finish that I don’t find at least entertaining. Once in a great while I write a harsh review, but not often. More often than not if I really dislike a book (for example Tara French’s book “Into the Woods” that I read and despised last year), I don’t review it at all. I need to be better about doing that, however, as it will provide more of a balanced, honest overall picture of my reviewing style if people can read about books I dislike.
I use the 5 star system on a forum I participate in and like you I find that it hasn’t got much scope; I seem to end up rating too many books 4 when they are good and enjoyable but not great and I’ll probably forget them in a few weeks.
I think I need to be harsher in my rating.
Other that during my recent YA Dystopian Challenge, I’ve stopped rating books altogether, just writing about my thoughts/feelings etc.
I found myself wanting to break things down even further first to .5 and then .25 and then…
Because well I liked it more that “a” but less than “b” so if “a” had a score of 8.25 and “b” had a score of 8.5 where do I go…
So rather than go mad, I stopped! ;o)
Now I’m curious – why did you hate “Into the Woods”? It was one of my favorites from last year. I especially enjoyed the ambiguous ending.
I don’t mind reading reviews of the books you hated…I’m sure you can make it interesting!
I do 1 – 5 but lately I’ve been frustrated with it. I’m thinking of changing the system but to what I have no idea. I like the 10 point rating system though. A lot more flexibility.
Carl, thanks for this very pertinent and timely post! As a fairly new book blogger, I’m still trying to figure out how to do it, and have been thinking about the whole rating thing lately. I haven’t really tried it out yet. This definitely gives me some ideas. Then again, like Darren mentioned above, maybe I don’t HAVE to rate the books I talk about? Decisions, decisions!
You know I really like to see ratings but I have such a hard time assigning any and so I’ve never done so on my blog. I do like your new rating system though – it should allow more room for selecting between books.
First, lease tell me more about this Classic Science Fiction Book Club you joined on-line.
Now, rating. When I started keeping track of how much I liked or didn’t the books I read, I used – purely for my own purposes – a simple 4 point: Very Good, Good, OK, Poor. Or if you prefer, A, B, C, D. When you get right down to it, that’s all anyone needs to know what they thought of a book, comments enlarge or lessen that simple rating.
When I began writing review for other people, in a genre-specific publication for mystery readers, I went completely the other way and created a 20 level system. It was pretty much your 5 point system with the quarter points, only each quarter was a full point. But it soon seemed that (1) readers spent too much time dwelling on the system or (2) the scoring pulled me into justifying and explaining it in every review or (3) the scoring was inclusive enough that no words were even need, defeating the purpose of my writing a review at all. So I very soon dumped that complicated and unwieldy system, though it did have flashy graphics.
I first went back to a simple 4 or 5 point rating, then decided that any rating tends to pull the reader away from the text and to take the shortcut of judging the book by the number or letter. So, though for my internal books-I-read list I rate books Exceptional-Very Good-Good-Average-Below Average-Poor, in reviews I don’t rate at all except with my words. I may SAY I think the book is exceptional, but I don’t append a number or letter to that effect. The reader must dot he work and draw a conclusion from what I say and my reasoning for it, NOT a rating.
RkR: I posted a link to the club in my Short Story Weekend post above this one. If you click on the link there is a place where you can request membership if you are interested. The home page lists the classic and contemporary books that are scheduled for the rest of the year, participation with any read is optional, and a short story is picked to read and discuss each week. Its a fun club. You, and everyone else who is interested, should request membership.
I agree with what you say about the person reading the review and drawing their conclusions from there, but I still find the rating system helpful. I may rail about it at times, but I find it helps me think when I look back over my reading year. And the few times I didn’t give a book a number rating I usually got emails about it, so it must make a difference to some. I’m hoping this slightly larger system makes it easier to equate my verbosity with a quantitative measure.
Iliana: I’m hoping it makes it easier for me to make a quick decision rating-wise that accurately reflects my experience with the book.
Jen: I’m torn on what to tell you. I think I would lean towards advising you to not get bogged down in a ratings system this early on and instead just use your words to describe your thoughts/experience with what you read. But if you choose to rate, look at what several people are doing and find something that will work for you without stressing you out. 🙂
Amy: It seems more flexible to me too. I know I found it handy doing short story reviews today.
Ella: It wasn’t so much the ambiguous ending. I like those when the story is well written. And it isn’t that I felt French didn’t write well, she just pissed me off as a reader. I listened to this on audio (excellent reader by the way) and was so sucked into the story that I would drive around for a long time after getting home from work just so I could listen to a little bit more. And then she made what I felt like was a cardinal sin: she took an interesting protagonist and turned him into a one-dimensional male-basing stereotype:
SPOILERS FOR INTO THE WOODS BY TARA FRENCH FOLLOW!!!
I saw the whole teenage girl thing coming from a mile away and I just knew…KNEW…French wouldn’t go down that cliched, tired road of having the male character lose all perspective and good sense because of his dick…but instead that is exactly what she did. I felt she shot all the stunning work she had done up to that point all to hell by relying on the kind of male characterization that would cause less enlightened people to assume she is male-basher, processing her issues through the pages of her book. It was sooooo cliched and such a waste. And then she had the gall to have that character break the fourth wall and say something stupid to the effect that he was justifying his being fooled by the girl saying that we too, the reader, were fooled. I practically shouted at the CD player at that point because not only was I not fooled but I saw this coming so very early in the story and trusted that French was a better writer than to go down that road. Adding to this was the other male-bashing stereotype where he has sex with someone, in this case his partner, and then cannot commit and thus ruins the relationship. I was devastated by the choices she made for her protagonist and the way it ruined his life. What point did it serve? This led to my not liking the ambiguous end too. I felt she spent waaaay to much time and was waaaaay to specific with that whole storyline to then leave it unresolved. That isn’t good or clever writing in my opinion. It read more like she couldn’t come up with a good idea in how to end that storyline so she tried to opt out with something clever and “literary” and I found it to be false.
I can see why people like her work. As I said, I was on the edge of my seat for hours, so sucked into the story. Which is why my anger was so profound when I felt she cheated me as a reader by taking the road more traveled.
Darren: I can understand that and honestly this is my last shot at using a rating system. If it works, and I hope it does, I’ll keep it. If I find myself struggling with it again I will ditch it for commentary only.
Katrina: I understand that. I worked myself into a corner with so many consistent “4” ratings that if I rated something in the “3”s I was worried people would write it off as a bad book when that wasn’t the case at all.
An interesting question. Personally, I only tend to rate books on Goodreads and using its scale. On my blog, I usually just say whether or not the book is recommended, highly recommended, or something along those lines. Rating is too subjective, and I find that looking back the stars could change as opposed to a recommendation.
Still, a rating is definitely helpful, provided you know how the reviewer’s doing it.
Logankstewart: I completely understand about ratings changing. One of the things I enjoy about keeping numerical ratings is comparing those to how I feel at the end of the year when it comes to picking “best of” books. Not all the books I chose for this year’s list were the highest rated at the time, but they have stuck with me and they stand out when it comes time to look back over the year. I find that interesting. It not only confirms what we all believe about the subjectivity, but also, in my opinion, proves that a person can review a book and mark it down some for technical issues, etc. but can still be profoundly affected by the story. I truly believe a good story can surmount many skill issues and that has certainly proven true with some of the books that have stuck with me over the past decade.
like Logan I only rate on goodreads using their system.. though I have kicked around the idea of implementing one on the blog, because they are useful for the very reasons you’ve stated. the 10 scale looks good, catching the nuances to recommendations. numbers seem so much more effective than the more subjective looking adjectives or superlatives.
I hope the system works for you but if not I’m totally happy if you go with commentary only.
To be 100% it’s your commentary that I come for on your reviews. You have a very objective way of looking at what you believe the author’s objective was with his or her story and if they achieved it for you as a reader. That insight is what I’m looking for on your blog. I can get number ratings from the masses at Amazon on their ratings system which I often look at for a quick hit on a book on unfamiliar with but the reviewer’s their don’t have the writing chops in most cases to properly breakdown a book in a review like you do. I also think you do a fairly good job of being spoiler free which I greatly appreciate.
Anyhow here’s look to another great year of reading in 2011.
Exactly, Carl. Seasons of life certainly dictate the rating (or feeling) of a book. Also, I really thing reading trends affect how we feel about books, too. I may be reading one good* book after another and then suddenly switch genres and mark it down because it’s not as good as the previous book. The same can also be said about books we remember fondly but only for sentimental reasons. For example, I loved Chris Paolini’s Eragon when it came out, but my preferences have changed so much since then that now, were I to rank it, I’d give it a very low score. So for me, scores really mean next to nothing unless I have a good grasp on the reviewer. Like Jeff said above, for you in particular, I come for your commentary.
I don’t rate my books for my blog posts, but I do rate them on my bookmark. My bookmark is where I keep a running list of the books I have read throughout the year, month by month. That means with the start of a new year that I now have a fresh bookmark…only two books to date. Anyway, I then asterik the book that I really like, and at end of month circle the asterisk book that is my favorite. I then place a number rating by each book so I have a better idea amongst them. This rating has proven helpful for me in putting together my top favorite reads of the year. All that to say, your new rating system has me thinking. I too have found the 5 scale system to be too stifling for my own purposes. I found that I am adding in 4.5 , 4.75, etc to books, and what does that really mean anyway? for me…it is better than the 4 scale book that I rated right before it…not very objective. I like the 10 scale because it has some simple, concise words behind each rating, and that could be a good thing for my bookmark…for me so I am seriously thinking of giving your new scale a go, but still will not add a rating to my blog posts. For them, I would rather use words, and hope that I do indeed convey how I felt about the book. The “bottom line” portion of my posts that I have relatively just started doing help give a concise easy to find “rating” in words. Okay…now to crawl back into my comfort hole of late. By the way, I agree with Logan and Jeff in that I come to your posts for your commentary. I rarely look at your rating…it is your words that I like.
I don’t rate books because I know that some books that are not suitable for my library are perfect for others. I try to give an overview of plot, strengths and weaknesses. If I don’t like something, I list positive reviews. I guess I look at plot summaries on other blogs, as well as opinions.
Ms. Yingling: That is an interesting idea, listing positive reviews for things you don’t like. Its like giving a counterpoint to your argument. Hmmmm… might have to consider that, thanks!