I used to have great ambitions of re-reading every book I read, to be able to judge it as best I possibly could, and write a perfectly accurate review.
Initially, my reviews were just my thoughts and feelings about the book, and my ratings were usually 1, 4, or 5 stars. I planned to write a rough review from my first read, then really polish my review into something professional on my second read. Eventually, I accepted that my re-reading ambitions were impractical – especially for the books I slogged through.
I decided that unless I absolutely loved a book or wanted to learn more from it later, I would only read a book once. Since each book now only got one shot (aside from the few exceptions), I needed to make some changes to the review process. Now, I take a bit more time and use a simple system with my ratings and reviews to make them as accurate as possible
For writing a review, I wait one day after finishing a book to let it set in my mind, then I use a basic outline to create a pointed review – one that at least I think is good. I write one paragraph for each of the following:
- Book description (an unbiased, 3-4 sentence book blurb)
- Pros
- Cons
- Overall (basically, what I would tell someone who asked if I would recommend the book)
I have been using this review system for the last few books that I have read, and it seems to be working well for me so far. If you go to my Goodreads profile today, you will see none of the reviews that I wrote before using this system, simply because they’re all over the place and I honestly don’t even get much out of them.
Tackling my rating system, I looked around at what some reviewers and booktubers were doing, and adapted things to fit how I think of books as I read them. Now, I use nine categories that work with my thought process:
- Quality of Writing (including things like pacing, grammar, understandability, etc.)
- Plot
- World Building (Fiction)
- Characters (Fiction)
- Insightfulness (Non-Fiction)
- Ease of reading
- Appropriate for Intended Age (mainly for Children’s books)
- Pictures/ Illustrations
- Overall Enjoyment
I then put the Goodreads 5-Star rating system on each category (omitting ratings that aren’t applicable). While I don’t like that the Goodreads system only really has one ‘bad’ rating, I figured that using their rating system would be easiest to translate my rating onto Goodreads.
- 1 Star – didn’t like it
- 2 Stars – it was OK
- 3 Stars – liked it
- 4 Stars – really liked it
- 5 Stars – it was amazing (I’m buying a copy … or two or three …)
I add up the ratings for each category, divide by the number of categories used, then round up to the nearest whole number to get a single star rating that is easy to use, and easy to understand.
I just started using this rating system and am still trying to nail down exactly what will work best for me to easily communicate my opinion of each book (easy for me to do and easy for you to understand). Again, my original Goodreads ratings were basically 1, 4, or 5 stars … all the more reason why those incredibly inaccurate reviews aren’t posted.
Please leave a comment to let me know how you rate and review – I’m guessing it’s a safe bet that if you’ve read this far, you probably do. And check back on 6/24/2020 to read my first book review post on the blog – Micael McClellan’s The Sand Sea.