Five Star Ratings

Starting with my reviews in February 2021, and more specifically with my review of The Queen, I’ve decided to put some definition around the five star ratings that I’ve been using. Five star ratings are the way that Goodreads allows you to tag your review. Goodreads provides very succinct (I’d call them sparse) definitons of the five different ratings, and I haven’t given them a lot of thought or connected with them. My ratings so far have been pretty impressionistic. In other words, they’ve just depended on how I felt after reading each book.

But when you start to review a large number of books you start to worry about inconsistencies between your ratings. At least I am starting to.

So, going forward I wanted to create definitions for the five star scale that I could relate to and also stick to in reviewing books. I’m using the scale below to rate my books, and I’ll try to include the specific rating language (maybe tailored a bit to each book) toward the end of each of my book reviews.

Ratings