What My Star Ratings Really Mean

I’ve recently been thinking a lot about giving books star ratings and how this works on Goodreads. I know a lot of reviewers really dislike the star system and so choose to just not rate books at all. While I do think that rating books can be a little problematic, I personally like doing it because it gives people a really quick overview of what I thought of the book. For instance, I categorize my book reviews by star rating so that people can quickly see what I like and what I’m not such a fan of.

But ratings can mean different things to different people. On Goodreads, giving something three stars means that you liked it. For me, three stars normally means it was so-so, while books that I like get four stars. So, just so that you people know, I’m going to clarify what each of my ratings means.

1 Star- Disliked; Stay Far Away!

These are books I extremely disliked. Normally I only rate a book one star when I disliked it so much that I actually stopped reading (this has only happened to one book so far.) Normally this means both that the book is boring me and that it has a lot of content that I’m not comfortable with.

2 Stars: Not Worth the Time

These are books that I just really didn’t care for. For instance, Twilight would go in this category. They’re poorly writen, somewhat boring, and just really didn’t resonate with me at all. I will definitely not be buying these books, re-reading them, reading the sequels, or recommending these to anyone.

3 Stars: Not Bad, Give it a Try

These are books that I’m on the fence about. They had some good elements but also a lot of flaws. I probably wouldn’t read any sequels, or more from the same author, but I might recommend them to a friend who likes the genre. Still, I definitely wouldn’t buy these or re-read them.

4 Stars: Pretty Good, I Enjoyed It

A lot of books tend to fall into this category. These are mainly books that I was excited about reading and had heard a lot of good things about, but then just fell a bit short for me. Maybe some of the characters felt flat, or the writing was just okay, or it dragged, or there was a lot of questionable content. Whatever the reason was, these books were good but not absolutely phenomenal. I’ll read the sequels, try to win the books or get them as presents, and recommend them to book-loving friends, but I won’t re-read them over and over.

5 Stars: Highly Recommended

I loved these books! These books are nearly perfect; they might have some minor flaws, but overall everything is great. I’ll definitely be re-reading these books, talking about them to all my friends, and any sequel will automatically be shoved to the top of my TBR pile.

I hope that clarifies any questions you might have about my ratings. Now, over to you. If you run a book blog, or rate stories on Goodreads and Amazon, what criteria do you use for each star? 

A Star-Rating Ramble

(WARNING: This post contains a dangerously high amount of opinions and ramblings. Read at your own risk!)

I hate star-rating a book on Goodreads. First of all, I find the star rating to be a really shallow way of judging the book. Am I rating it according to how much I enjoyed it? Or should I rate it according to how good I thought it was? And what does ‘good’ mean? There’s so much that a star rating can’t tell you.

But now, my main problem with the star rating system on Goodreads is how it gives each star rating a description. For instance, three stars is ‘liked it’ while one star is ‘disliked it’ and five stars is ‘it was amazing.’ While this clears up exactly what each star rating really means, it does present me with a bit of a problem.

I haven’t found an amazing book in awhile. I know that sounds terrible (and let me get this straight, this says a LOT more about me than about the books I’ve been reading) but it’s true. The last book I read and thought ‘this is amazing’ was Divergent, and that was a year ago. Since then I’ve read a lot of ‘meh’ books and some fairly good books, but all of them fell short in some way.

Take SHATTER ME, for instance. (Since I’m reviewing this book for Divine Debutantes magazine I won’t be posting a review here, but you can read a shortened version on Goodreads.) I’d heard so many amazing things about this book, and the premise sounds fantastic. Seriously, a girl with a touch that can kill in a dystopian world? What could be better?

Think again. SHATTER ME was nothing like I expected. Instead of a strong heroine, I found Juliet to be almost a little wimpy. Instead of a fast-paced book, I found that very little happens. Instead of a dystopian, I got a romance. Yes, it was still a great story, but I disliked it because I had thought it was going to be the sort of story I would love, and then it turned out to be something else entirely.

Now, how in the world can I rate it? My feelings about this book are sort of meh, but on Goodreads that would be equivalent to just two stars, and I definitely feel like SHATTER ME deserves more than that. I’ve ended up giving it four stars (thanks to the fantastic premise) which on Goodreads means that I really liked it. Which, as you’ll know if you read the review, I really didn’t.

Alright. This post has been a lot of ramble, but my main points are these:

1- I don’t really like giving books a star rating

2- I don’t like the ‘tags’ with the Goodreads star ratings

3- I’m having trouble finding books that I really like

4- I think my trouble is because of unrealistically high expectations

This post was really supposed to be about numbers three and four, but it seems like I got sidetracked. I guess I’ll need to write another post sometime soon…

Over to you… does any of this feel familiar? What do you guys think about giving books star ratings? Do you like the Goodreads ‘tags’ for ratings? Why or why not? I’d love to hear other opinions on ratings. 

Too Many Books, So Little Time

How many books do you read in a year? Supposing you read regularly, but not for long periods of time (say, while you’re drinking tea, or sitting on the bus) you can probably finish a book a week. Or maybe you’re a bit faster than that, and you manage to finish two books a week. If you read really fast, maybe you’ll finish three or four.

Whatever the case is, unless you spend all your time reading, you’re not going to finish more than 200 books a year. Even that is pretty insanely fast. My goal for this year is 100, and I’m worried about making that because I started kind of late. On the Goodreads challenge, the average is just 70.

Now for some statistics. Google estimates that there are nearly 130,000,000 books in the world. If you want to read them all, even working at the crazy-fast pace of 200 a year, that’s going to take you 650,000 years. That’s over 8000 lifetimes.

Of course, you can’t even read all of those. What about the books published in Estonia or Iran or Turkey? Let’s also assume that you’re only interested in English books. And to make things easier, let’s only think about the ones that are recently available. According to Bowker, 288,355 books were published in the US in 2009 alone. That’s a little better, right? You’re only going to be spending 1400 years reading. Oh, wait. I forgot. That’s just one year’s worth of books you’ve finished. By the time you’re done all of 2009’s books, your backlog will be 415,743,030 books long. Time to settle down for another 2,078,715 years of reading…

At the more normal rate of 70 books a year, for each book you read, there’ll be at least 4000 others published that year that you won’t get to read. Then again, you probably don’t actually want to read all the books in the world. There are cookbooks, and lame self-help books and children’s picture books that you have absolutely no interest in. Maybe, like me, you’re mainly interested in young adult books.

Guess what? There’s still way too many of those. Goodreads has 845 young adult books listed as anticipated reads for 2010 and 2011. For you, that’s 422.5 books to read each year. More than twice what you could read, even if you were insanely fast. And those are just the most anticipated books; it’s not a comprehensive list. If you’re a slower reader, you’re going to miss out on about 400 fairly high profile books every year.

I could continue, but I’m sure you get the picture. There is absolutely no way you’ll be able to read anywhere near all the books that you see on blogs, or that your friends talk about, or that you notice in the bookstore. It’s just plain impossible.

But you know what? That’s okay. When you learn that you can’t read everything, it also means that you don’t have to read everything. If you don’t like romance, then you don’t need to read it. There are plenty of action novels being published. If you don’t like fantasy, then go pick up some general fiction instead. It’s that simple. The sheer number of books being published may seem overwhelming, but it’s also so wonderful. It’s like standing in the middle of a candy shop. You can’t eat everything or you’ll get so sick. So instead you just eat a bit of your absolute favourite kind.

I have close to sixty books ordered at my local library, and another ten at home that I haven’t read yet. In three months I’m moving out. There’s no way I can read 70 books in three months while working and writing. A lot of those books are going to have to go. It’ll be hard, choosing the ones I don’t want to read, but I’ll end up with a summer of fantastic stories in genres I love. What could be better than that?