Rating System - Emily’s Journal of Thoughts

My frustrations with rating systems

Thinking back to my school days, there were two categories of grades I got: the ones that were objective and easy to understand for my maths and French assignments, and the ones that weren’t for my arts and crafts assignments. I could never figure out what criteria the teacher was using to say that my sponge trees were better than my friend’s sponge trees but worse than my girlfriend’s sponge trees and that issue has become even more problematic when looking at book reviews online.

Art is inherently subjective, the message or meaning behind it is less so, but the importance of that message is again up to the viewer/reader/beholder. Different genres will attract different crowds, and looking online, different websites also have different communities each with their own standards. I’ve read books averaging a 9/10 on Goodreads which I struggled to finish out of boredom, and I read supposedly mediocre 5/10 books which entertained me greatly. I also found myself both agreeing and disagreeing with the reviews of a same person for different books within the same genre.

Ultimately, this means that I often have to rely on my gut instinct when it comes to picking up a book, which fortunately has been mostly a success. I cannot pretend that my own ratings are any better than anyone else’s but I’m hoping that by outlining my thought process here that my book scores remain consistent.

How I approach the rating process

I’m also not making any pretence at an objective review process, what follows are the criteria I refer to when assigning a score. Each criterion below expands with an example of how I apply it.

The best way to understand what I would call “a good time” with a book is to refer to the About Me section which gives a more personal insight into who I am and infer from it what I look for in a book.

Looking at the romance genre as one real world example; I typically am looking for chemistry and personality based relationship building with ideally an additional storyline keeping things interesting. If the story exclusively focuses on the physical attractiveness of the love interests and/or the romantic relationship building is the only story thread in the book I would grow disinterested.

The best example I have of a book not meeting this criterion is Altered Carbon which told a story in a cyberpunk world and significantly focused on sex and character relationships when I was hoping for a larger focus on the cyber and futuristic technology presented in the world.

Looking at the murder mystery genre, I’d be looking for a puzzle to try to solve alongside the protagonist. If the resolution comes out of the blue without having been properly set up, that would be one case of poor storytelling in my eyes.

A few romances I read had some blurry consent lines leading to the glorification of rape, whether intentional or not, it’s too bad a faux-pas to ignore.

I’ll easily forgive the occasional slip up, but I’ve had a couple edge cases where consistent grammar mistakes and even wrong character name spelling took me out of the reading experience.

These criteria all weigh positively or negatively on the base score which in my case is a 5/10. A lot of modern reviews are skewed towards very positive scores where anything below an 8/10 is seen as “bad”. Strictly speaking you could ignore everything below an 8/10 and still find enough books to last you a lifetime but if you like a specific genre enough (e.g. romantic comedies), you might just prefer a 7/10 book in that genre over a 9/10 book in a vaguely related genre (e.g. romantic dramas). With this in mind, the table below supplements a short description to each numerical score. The table does not include a 0/10 score simply because I am not purposefully going to read books that are fundamentally wrong like Mein Kampf or The International Jew so assuming everything I read doesn’t have the sole purpose of propagating hate a 0/10 should never happen.

Score	Description
*1/10*	A book setting a new standard of low being more infuriating or disturbing to read than simply bad or boring. It is very unlikely I would give this rating to a book I picked to read given that I’d expect my gut instinct to pick up on something beforehand.
*2/10*	A book without any form of compelling storytelling and displaying critical flaws whether it be writing quality or the message given.
*3/10*	The blurb got me interested enough to pick this up but the resulting story failed to generate any sort of interest. This is all likelihood the lowest I would go for a book I picked myself with no critical flaws.
*4/10*	A potentially interesting story that has been poorly executed leading to a more boring reading experience than I would have otherwise expected.
*5/10*	A completely average book, it is not a waste of time to read if you enjoy the genre or the blurb but if there are any other books you were thinking of reading that might score higher, I would recommend you start with those.
*6/10*	The world has got a solid core idea that has me interested in the story and there’s been instances of that concept being used compellingly. Unfortunately, it falls slightly short at fully engaging me.
*7/10*	In the simplest terms, a good book whose story, world, and/or characters had me fully engaged but won’t be leaving a lasting impact.
*8/10*	A good book that had me fully engaged and whose story I will remember in more detail than I usually would, only held back my minor flaws.
*9/10*	A near perfect book whose story I’ll remember deeply and in which I will have found almost no flaws. Books here only fall short of the 10/10 books in terms of personal impact.
*10/10*	A book that is setting a new standard for the genre or my reading experience as a whole moving forward, or that has hit an extremely personal chord with me.