She hadn’t dealt with all of it, but the fact that she felt safe enough to have children in the post-Revolution world is huge.

I really enjoyed the series. I thought it was well written, esp the trauma. I read the one about president snow as well and thought it was an interesting look into the growth of that character, his ability to be so reasonable about the awful choices he makes was intriguing. The author really has the ability to make you care about this man that you know is HORRIBLE. I thought it was great writing.

We did it Patrick! We saved America!

/s

Reading is like a flavor palate. Not everyone will like the same books/dishes. That’s ok. Don’t let the opinions of others rain on your parade. If you find an author, genre, or medium you enjoy, then celebrate and embrace it. Haters are going to hate either way. Lots of so called canon wasn’t for me. And I avoided graphic novels for far too long because I thought the art form was less than in some way. Taste in cooking and literature is subjective. Read on

A few others on here have mentioned that they screen for books so that they rarely come across books they don’t like. For me, I’m always suspicious of reviewers who only score highly; that is improbable scoring!

I read in images and think in images.

It's complicated I think because even though I have a follower audience of only 4, I really want to be fair to the authors. I often go back and edit my ratings down on average by 1 star a few months later.

5: It could be life changing for me. At the very least it was profound in its artistry and I have read nothing like it. There were no problems with the characters, prose, or plot. It left me thinking and enriched my intellectual or spiritual life. It's an important book for someone to read because they might finish a better person.

4: Really incredible in just about every way. No character development bromides. Unique in some way (I really appreciate novelty). I derived value from this book intellectually or spiritually even if it didn't introduce any necessarily new concept.

3: It was good. There were some things that didn't quite work for me. The most common culprit is a repetitive word or phrase or a character that doesn't really feel totally genuine. I enjoyed reading it almost every step of the way, even if some parts may have been overly contrived.

2: It has something that really irked me but I was ble to finish and appreciate it in some way. This may be that a character is just unrealistic (most common), for example a child said to have an enormous IQ and that somehow means she uses adult idioms that, despite her intelligence, wouldn't have the life experience yet to really speak that way. Or an the same deal but an overly matured child. I really really dislike when an author (Stephen King and John Grisham do this a lot) fixate on sexual aspects of women. I really hate whenever a male main character encounters a women, I must read a paragraph about his thoughts on her boobs and ass, which is sometimes the very first thing to come up when her character is introduced. Brandon Sanderson flirts with this in Way of Kings between Dalinar and Navani but he doesn't take it far enough to be annoying - I just feel like I don't need to read 50 times over how hot he finds her. To digress though, there was something about the book that redeemed it such that finishing didn't take years off my life span.

1: A rare rating for me. Always a DNF. These books are trash and make me think that if THIS got published, maybe I have a chance to be an author too. All of the issues in the 2 star but also the plot and characters are entirely inane. This is like the book equivalent of watching a slapstick cartoon. Maybe it's for adults but it's just so puerile, boring, and even annoying. First book that comes to mind is Gerald's Game. Closed that one after 10 pages and donated it to the café bookshelf

I didn’t get past the paywall, so pretty much just a comment on reading in general.

This is how it works at my house. The school library will only let kids check out books from “their” grade level. None of my kids read at the level expected for their grade, they either fall above or below it. Our public library opens after they leave for school and closes before they get home. If you can get all the stars to align, all the extra-curriculars cancel everything, and you can make it during the 2 hours they are open on Saturday, they don’t have anything on the page long list of books you are looking for. If you download the Libby app, the list of books for kids is pretty slim in our library system and the wait times are long.

So then you are stuck buying the books. And there’s only so much time, money, and space in your house.

I rate by how much I enjoyed it and how likely I am to pick up the next in the series or try other books by the same author. Although I'm aware that the ratings are public, I rate for my own information.

3* and 4* are my most common ratings, it has to be pretty bad for me to want to rate it lower and it has to make a big impression for me to give it 5*

And having everyone in the capital having Roman names etc. It was probably just going a little too hard

This particular book talks about prostate massage among other things. People that dont want their children seeing that stuff arent crazy or FaSciSt.

Its nothing like that and shouldnt be compared.

Is this really that complicated? Video games and tv that have engineered to be as fun and addicting as possible >>> using mental energy to read boring words off a page.

right, so sorry for caring, i'll go on my merry way

This is gross but teaching children about prostate massage is gross too. That book shouldnt be in school.

People need to learn what a book ban is because theyve obviously forgot.

This is an interesting question! I feel very unstandardized at times so a lot of the books I read wind up as 3 stars as a result. I think my biggest criteria when I am between ratings is the writing quality. Generally:

5 stars: Very exclusive. I only use this rating for my favorite books of all time. Subjectively, I absolutely loved something about it (characters, plot, world, tone). Can’t stop thinking about it. Has to have high quality writing or creative writing.

4 stars: Usually books that I really enjoyed, read through quickly as a result, but maybe not perfect in terms of writing or plot. Minor flaws.

3 stars: Anything in between good and bad. I am glad I read it, but there’s nothing super special about it either. Some good aspects and some parts I didn’t like.

2 stars: has to have both bad writing + really bad story to be in this section.

1 star: unbearable to read or DNF. I am a completionist so I have literally only a couple DNFs before, read them most of the way through, and feel justified in rating the book even if only partially completed.

Agreed I found it very derivative, and quite honestly the writing was sub-par for the reception it received. One of the few book to movie adaptions where I prefer the movies.

I used to do it like you stated. But I track a lot of books in spreadsheets to construct my reading lists, and one of the things that I've noticed is that the range of ratings on Goodreads is quite narrow. For instance, of the 381 books I'm tracking that were published in 2022, the Goodreads ratings range from a minimum of 3.14 to a maximum of 4.81. So there are only a range of 1.7 stars between the "very worst" book and the "very best" book. I think most people are giving books a 4, unless it was really good, and they bump it to 5, or it is meh, and they drop it to 3. This seems like a pretty lazy approach to rating books.

So now I have a rating system from 1 to 10 (which I divide by 2 to get a Goodreads rating), and multiple categories that I rate. For instance, I might really like the world building in a book, but think the dialog is crappy, or that the first two thirds of the book is excellent, but it fell short in the last third. People have a tendency to rate a book according to its worst attribute -"The book was excellent, but it had a weak ending, so the book is weak." Or, "the book was excellent, but the dialog was crap, so the book is crap". So I currently have seven categories that I rate, and average them to make a final rating. I have an overall informal rating as well, and if the numbers don't match the overall rating, I have to ask myself why the metrics don't match. Either I'm not being honest about it, or I'm missing a category.

In the end it doesn't matter, since most books add up to a 4 rating (out of 14 books read so far this year, one was rated 3, eleven were rated 4, and one was rated 5) . But at least I can explain my rating to myself.

As a former middle/high school English teacher, I have really learned to appreciate and enjoy YA books. I read the Twilight series (up to book 4 I think) because so many of my students were in to it. I didn't love it, but I read it anyway.

I really enjoyed The Hunger Games trilogy (this week, I just began reading A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes). I think it stands up as a strong novel/trilogy that happens to have teens as its main characters.

I hadn't yet realized there is a lot of hate toward this trilogy on the subreddit. :( That's sad.

the hunger games being about romance is capitol propaganda!

If it was well written but I didn’t like it, I usually give it 2*-3* as a middle-ground, and make a short review/comment pointing this out to be clear. I might also skip rating it entirely. It depends a bit on how much I didn’t enjoy it, and for what reasons!

Almost certainly a little Reichstag. Faking bias violence is a cottage industry. Assume Juicy Smoyeh until proven otherwise.

Wow, it's amazing to see that our LGBTQ community is so strong, and we have this much power to frighten and scare small minds into acts of radical self-immolation.

Perhaps we were always meant to be galvazined into a fighting force, and now that we're getting better armed and better trained, I think we can overrun anyone in our way.

When I get really into what I'm reading, no. Most of the time, yes.

I used an app a while ago that claimed to help increase reading speed by reducing subvocalization. To practice, I would read a passage while counting out loud. Then started reading while counting in my head. I don't know that it really helped me, but worth a shot if this is something you're concerned about.

5. Loved it, still think about it months or years later. I never read books a second time, so for me that's not a qualifier for 5 stars.

6. Just an excellent book, but with minor flaws. Usually related to pacing.

7. Just decent, was worth my time.

8. Obvious issues with the plot, writing, characters etc. For example if your characters are cardboard cutouts you end up here.

9. Never rated a book a 1. I don't rate DNFs, and apart from that I'm pretty strict in my book selection.