Book ratings

I’ve been meaning to write a guide to my book ratings for a while! I know that for some people this can be a touchy subject, so I wanted to get my method on record.

📚Ratings are for readers

There are some people who don’t believe you should rate a book if it’s a low rating, presumably because it’ll hurt the author’s feelings. I’m of the opinion that ratings are for other readers, not writers, so I think that’s a little silly. If you are a writer you’ve just got to accept that people are going to read your stuff and share their opinions about it.

I do think though if, as a reviewer, you are going to give a lower rating you have to explain why you didn’t like it, and not just say “because it’s bad.” What was bad about? The writing, plot, content, characters? This lets other readers gage if they are likely to enjoy it or not.

Whenever I’m thinking of reading a book I look up the three star or under reviews first on Goodreads because I know what I do and don’t like, and those usually give me the best indication of whether a book will suit me.

… and the reader is me 🤓

All of my book reviews I write for my own benefit. I like to look back on them and recall what I did or didn’t like. Over time this is helping me recognise what I enjoy reading. My reviews are 100% about my personal, totally subjective, enjoyment and experience reading the book.

Every reader is different. No two people are going to have the same experience reading the same book. Some people prefer characters, others really like detailed world building. Some love the comfort of genre tropes or formulas, others prefer to be surprised and challenged. I think most people like a bit of both depending what’s going on in their life.

Even the same reader has different moods – sometimes what I want to read is a by the numbers rom-com where I can be cosy knowing what’s going to happen. Other times I want something to make me think, that I can get stuck into.

There are so many books that have average 4 or 5 star ratings on Goodreads that I have rated low, or even couldn’t finish. Usually I didn’t think they were bad books, it’s just they were not the books for me (except Hoofin’ It which was just bad, but lesson learned on very niche genre books!).

(There are also some super popular ones I’ll always be confused how anyone thinks are good 😂).

My taste skews towards

• Character over purely plot-focused stories, with rich characters that I can feel emotionally invested in.
• I like to feel emotional truth. I love to read things that help me understand myself, or to others and the world around us. This is why I’m about the character driven stories.
• I like a bit of romance now and again, but because I’m looking for an emotional truth, I’m very picky! I find maturity and healthy communication sexy. I am very turned off by miscommunication and toxic behaviours in romance. I’m about “acts of service” over declarations of love (show me don’t tell me!).
• I don’t in general enjoy writing styles that are overly poetic and flowery. I don’t like digging through too much metaphor.
• I like to feel challenged – whether that’s a twisty mystery, a cool literary device or just testing my world view. I love an unreliable narrator! I love a well done ambitious ending.

So here is a rough guide to how I assign my ratings out of 5:

• ⭐ 1 Star : I use this for books I couldn’t finish, I do this because I use Goodreads and you can’t give 0 stars on there, and I want a way to record what I’ve read in a year, even the ones I could finish. And if I finished a book, it meant it was passable at least so deserves an extra star! It is very rare that I need to do this, I’m good at knowing my own taste. Usually if  a book got this rating I’d made a miscalculation when I picked it up! (The Song of Achilles is a good example of that 😂)
• ⭐⭐ 2 Stars: I finished the book but it felt like a struggle, and I probably ended up skim reading a lot of it just to get though the thing.
• ⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars: These are middle of the road books. Nothing that got me excited, but they were just fine.
• ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars: I had a good time reading it, I felt like I got something out of the experience and I’d recommend it to other people.
• 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 5 Stars: I got super excited about it! I’ll buy a hardcopy for my library, and I’ll likely read it again. Sometimes for these books I’ll write up a longer review with analysis.