Friday, July 18, 2014

Can I get a half ladybug, please?

I've been thinking about revamping my ratings system a bit.  I'm finding that my ratings don't always reflect my overall impression of the book and how much I enjoyed it.  Take, for example, one of my recent reads, The 57 Lives of Alex Wayfare by M. G. Buehrlen.  With my current criteria, I ended up giving it 3.57 out of 5 ladybugs, which I rounded up to 4 (because the idea of chopping a ladybug in half seemed just plain wrong).  But that 3.57 doesn't really take into account my overall impression or how I felt while I was reading the book; I do have a rating for enjoyment that factors into the total, but it often seems not to make enough of a difference (and that also applies when I haven't enjoyed a book that was otherwise well written but maybe wasn't my cup of tea).  Had I rated the aforementioned book without doing all the math, I probably would have given it a solid 4, just based on my overall impression.

I'm going to figure out a way to have my numerical ratings better reflect how I really felt about what I read.  I'm not sure if that'll involve somehow giving the enjoyment number more weight, or reworking the criteria altogether.

Beyond that, I'm going to have some half-ladybug ratings.  But, don't worry!  No bug abuse was involved.  The icons will look like this:


Then maybe books like Eat, Brains, Love won't end up with a misleading 3-ladybug rating in my review archives when my enjoyment rating was only a 2 (it got 3 points for pacing and originality, which skewed the final outcome).

1 comment:

  1. I love the way you do your ratings because they remind me a little bit of mine! I've found that I also have to do some adjustment on the ratings to get it to total up to what I feel is an accurate total. I like your solution of an enjoyment rating!

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