My Book Rating Scale

Hello readers! I wanted to take a moment to discuss how I personally review the books that I read. I know this may be different for everyone, and though I constantly feel the need to switch my methods of ranking (my mind is always so fickle, and books are so diverse), I believe that it's important to be consistent so that others can understand how I truly feel about a specific story. Using the same metric every time I rate a book allows us to have an objective gauge by which to judge each book fairly, so feel free to adopt this scale for your reviews!

Since I use Goodreads fairly often, my system is based around a 5-star rating. I try my best to avoid half-star reviews, since I feel like at that point I might as well use a 10-star rating. What's nice about the 5-star system is that it can also be translated into a grading scale, which some people may prefer! Here's what each star means to me in general:

5-stars: This book gave me an emotional response. Even after reading this book, I continue to dwell upon the story and form an attachment to its characters. This book may inspire me either from an authoring standpoint or from an artistic perspective, and I highly recommend this book. It is a book I would happily come back to, and it feels like home: familiar. Examples of 5-star books for me: A Night in Funland and Other Stories from the Literary Cavalcade, And Then There Were None

4-stars: I enjoyed this book. I had fun reading this novel and would recommend it to others. It didn't have any glaring problems that took away from the story, and I would definitely enjoy rereading this book.

Examples of 4-star books for me: A Touch of Darkness, The Cruel Prince, A Court of Thorns and Roses

3-stars: This book was fine. I wasn't bored while reading it, but it didn't make me feel any one way in particular. There may be some issues with the novel (such as writing style, pacing, etc.), but they didn't make me hate the book. This book may be forgettable after some time, depending on the story, but not always. It may even be a genuinely good book that's just not my cup of tea! This is a safe book.

Examples of 3-star books for me: Midnight in Everwood, Legends & Lattes

2-stars: I did not like this book. Whether it be the characters, worldbuilding, internal logic, plot, or another issue, something(s) caused me to not enjoy this book. I would not recommend it to others and would have no desire to reread it without a legitimate reason to do so. While reading, I may have wanted to stop reading it at some point or felt as if I had to read as quickly as possible just to get it over with.

Examples of 2-star books for me: A Kingdom of Blood and Betrayal

1-star: This book is offensive to me, and I genuinely hate this novel. It gave me a negative emotional reaction, and I may have felt angry or indignant while reading it. I would never recommend this book to other and would encourage people to actively avoid it if possible. Because I believe in finishing what I started, I never DNF a book - but this book made me want to do so multiple times. This is a very rare rating, so it would have to be somewhat extreme! So far, no book has fallen into this category - and I hope to keep it that way!

I hope this ranking is helpful for you, and that it gives you a better understanding of how my book reviews will be scaled. Each book is unique so they may not fit into a category perfectly, but I believe that this is the best way for me to generally categorize my thoughts. Please let me know if you have any questions, and I'd love to know what you think! How do you rate your books?