Every so often I read a book that's so good it makes me feel like I need to recalibrate my book ratings scale. How can it be a "five star" book when it's so much better than other "five star" books I've read?

But I've always found the ubiquitous star rating scales poorly suited to my mental model of cataloguing books, which vary so widely they could never be boiled down to a plain numeric scale. Do the stars represent how much I enjoyed a book? The depth of feelings it made me feel? The quality of the prose? The ease with which I find myself turning to the next page?

I've deeply enjoyed many a book with terrible writing and clichéd plots; is that a five star book? How do I rate a book with beautiful prose and intricate plotlines, that nonetheless causes me to dread picking it back up?

Anyway, this is all to say you should read East of Eden, which topped the charts in just about every category: prose, enjoyment, feelings, etc.

https://www.mollywhite.net/micro/entry/east-of-eden
#bookstodon

@molly0xfff Timshel.

@molly0xfff Oh my goodness. I love love love that book. I agree it excels on many levels. I often drive though the Salinas Valley and think of that book every time I do.

Now, read or re-read "Grapes of Wrath". Equally incredible, and perhaps my favorite book of all time.

@snowgaze ha — i just added to the original post to capture this also!

@molly0xfff

interesting.
ive been deeply affected by a few books, so i really relate to your post about using higher ratings. but i guess this is why i also only have like ten 5-star books.

that said, unfortunately, i hated East of Eden & find it to be highly overrated.. lmao.

but. glad to hear that someone whose opinion i really respect liked it so much tho!

(i guess, we all have our unpopular, or wrong! opinions -- & i say this about ME, not you.)

@rustoleumlove agreed, not every book is for everybody!

@molly0xfff I’ll add it to my list.

Have you read “the tiger’s wife” by Téa Obreht? For me that was/is a ratings re-definer of a book.

@molly0xfff I think this is an excellent read now, but when I was like 9 my grandpa tried to make me read it and I hated it so much that I went to the library and asked for the opposite of it and now I'm a fantasy and scifi addict.

@secretbatcave I haven't! Thanks for the recommendation!

@vadhakara indeed, some books just find you at the wrong time

@molly0xfff huh, I feel similarly. My rating is normalized: I rarely give a book 5 stars, maybe once every 2 years. Very different from the norm of ratings nowadays where 5 stars means "ok" and 4 stars means "terrible".

@molly0xfff this is a thing I've thought a lot about! I mostly rate based on how much I enjoyed a thing, not by how objectively "good" it is.

I think personal scales can shift over time, but that keeps the system close to you, not public perception of a thing

https://david.reviews/rating/books/

@molly0xfff Yes. Also, "deepness"?

@molly0xfff I have one criteria for 5 stars. After I read a book I choose 1 to 4 stars. Then if I find that I'm still thinking of the book and it's impliations several weeks after I finished it, I go back and make it 5 stars.

But many books cluater in 3 to 5 stars

@molly0xfff in terms of ratings - I really liked (and adopted) @kepano’s scale listed on here https://stephango.com/vault it’s a nice extension beyond 5 but not as muddy as 10.

@molly0xfff it was a wonderful and sprawling book. I guiltily gave it 4 stars though I really loved it. It just wasn't as 'perfect' as Grapes of Wrath, perhaps due to its ambition.

@molly0xfff I only just read East of Eden this past year as well and I had the _exact_ same reaction. Nearly every sentence is perfect. It’s such an easy book to live in.

I went down a deep rabbit hole after pn Tishmel, trying to figure out if Steinbeck really did stumble onto a novel reading of the Torah. That journey was almost as fascinating too.

@molly0xfff based on its Wikipedia synopsis, it looks grim. Not sure whether to add it to my list of books that I'll never get around to reading.

@ghouston I wouldn't describe it as grim at all

@molly0xfff it's all murder, death, suicide.

@molly0xfff

Yes. It moved me.
I read it about 10-15 years ago.

I'm waiting for the right time to recommend it to my young adult kids.

@molly0xfff
yeah same. I've taken to rating based on tags. "woah" is basically "I can't believe something can be this good". "didnt get it", is for when I don't understand the appeal, very useful for things you didn't finish. etc.

Ideally, these should be followed with a timestamp to show when I thought this.

All in all, numbers are bad for ratings imo, they suggest a bunch of things that aren't true, like that you can take an average of the score, or that you can order them.

@molly0xfff some feedback on how you're publishing what you're reading

I follow your work in a few ways, rss from your site, follow on mastodon, subscribe to your youtube channel,in my podcast app on my phone

I love times a million the video actually reviewing the books you read.

In my rss reader, I get a post saying like "Molly started reading this book", or finished reading. I kinda want this to be decoupled and unsubscribe, there's nothing useful beyond book titles

@bajabanjo perhaps you would prefer the micro feed? https://www.mollywhite.net/rss/