I still keep track of the books I read on Good Reads. One day I might switch over to the fediverse, BookWyrm, but for now the process of switching seems like more work that I’m excited to put in. Good Reads is also home to several people who I really appreciate and I’m always glad to see what they’ve read and what they’ve rated what they’ve read.
Good Reads is updating its interface and the tool tips that share Good Reads rating system are going away, so I thought I’d briefly share what I’m thinking about when I rate a book.
Ratings on Good Reads are complicated. There’s a five start system and everyone is free to give how ever many stars as they want to anything they read (or haven’t read). I find knowing my friends on Good Reads, I understand a bit about a book depending on how different people rate it.
When you look at reviews, it’s evident that a lot of people are putting a lot of different rules together to determine how they rate books. Slightly in secret however, Good Reads has its own tags for what the stars mean and I’ve adopted and adapted that scale for my own ratings.
I should start by saying that my book ratings are totally subjective, and also that they change over time. I re-read the first two books of The Checquy Files this year and didn’t love them as much as I did before. In writing this post, I looked back at Becky Chambers’ books and was surprized at how few stars I gave them at the time.
Beyond that, though here are the five named star rating levels from Good Reads tool tips and how I think about them.
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1 Star - did not like it
This is a great place to start the stars scale. If I find a book totally unreadable, then I usually don’t finish and don’t give it a rating. This is for the books that weren’t great but had some element that made me keep going. Some of them have writing problems, but for me the books I don’t like tend to have a poorly articulated plot or wild mischaracterization.
I haven’t given a book 1 Star this year, but the recent ones include The Murder Room and Nemesis and in both cases I think the authors were starting to go into decline. I also have Mr. Churchill’s Secretary here, which mostly did not jive with my understanding of mathematics and codebreaking and civil service during World War II and The Forever Peace which I can’t actually remember reading (or can’t differentiate from The Forever War at minimum).
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2 Stars - it was ok
Even if I don’t like a book, there’s usually something interesting to see in it. Sometimes there’s something specific and large that pushes me out, but often they’re books I just don’t really jive with. If I were to use the Sword and Laser scale, they’re mostly books I have to force myself to read rather than make excuses to read.
The vast majority of Issac Asimov’s books have fallen in here for me. The foundation world building is always interesting, but having two men whose only distinguishing characteristic is that one of them has a beard argue each argument really doesn’t do it for me. The Oleander Sword is an example of a book not jiving, it’s very well written, but so bleak I struggled to read it.
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3 Stars - liked it
These are the books I’m happy to read. They were good. I liked them. They may not have made me fall in love with them, but when it was time to read (on the Sword and Laser scale) I was happy to be reading them.
There are a whole bunch of books that come in here, recently most of the Charles Todd’s Rutladge books and the Illona Andrews Kate Daniels series. Just pretty good books that I like, but that don’t really sink their hooks into me.
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4 Stars - really liked it
These are the books I make time to read. “You know, I should really go give the sink a wash so I can put the audiobook on and listen”.
These are the books with something really compelling in them, usually the characters that make it easy to read. Sometimes the story, sometimes the writing and very occasionally the world building will be the thing that keeps me in.
Patricia Brigg’s Mercy Thompson books go here for me, even though there are elements that I might not like I’m attached enough to Mercy and co. that I’m really happy to get to spend time in their world. Komi Can’t Communicate, seeing the characters live life, sometimes struggling and sometimes succeeding makes me happy. The Firekeeper’s Daughter also fit in here for me, written in a way that kept me wanting to read more, similarly with Moon of the Crusted Snow, where both the writing and the world building kept me interested through out.
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5 Stars - it was amazing
If a four star book helps get the chores done a five star book is so good that I get nothing done. These are the books I love, the characters or the worlds I’m compelled by and usually the books I don’t ever stop thinking about.
This year, they are Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie and An Immense World by Ed Yong. Ancillary Justice is a fascinating read, with interesting characters, unusual perspectives, intricate world building and an exciting plot. It’s the book I’ve read the most as an adult, it inspires me to write and if you talk about enough things with me I will start telling you why you aught to read it.
An Immense World is also fantastic. It breaks down your understanding of perception and beautifully illustrates how different animals in the same space experience the space based on their own umwelt which means a lot of that experience not only isn’t shared but is profoundly incomprehensible to each other.
I also have a volume of Komi Can’t Communicate in there, and while I can’t remember specifically which one Volume 17 is, if it’s where I think it is, it’s a situation where the characters we’ve gotten to know for years now, reach a point in their growth where they fundamentally change and become better people for the growing.
So that’s what I’m thinking about when I rate a book on good reads. Obviously a five star rating system is silly, but it’s a convenient short hand and certainly when I see other people’s ratings, it gives me a feeling for what to expect from a book.
Now you might ask yourself whether this was just an excuse to talk about Ancillary Justice, An Immense World and Komi Can’t Communicate, and of course it was.
