You may have noticed that none of my book reviews contain ratings for anything that I read. That’s because I don’t rate books anymore.
I made the decision to stop rating books a few years ago, right around when the amount of reading I had to do for my English major picked up. As I started reading books from a wider variety of genres, I found it more and more difficult to come up with ratings. Some books I love because they’re enjoyable to read; others I love because I appreciate what their authors were trying to achieve, even though the book itself may be less enjoyable to read. For instance, I loved Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta, but not in the same way that I loved The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. But if I rated them each 5 stars, wouldn’t that look the same? How could I differentiate between my feelings for these books when their ratings were the same?
I felt like rating books also put pressure on me to then really justify that rating in the book reviews I wrote. I would rate a book 5 stars and then end up writing a review that both praised and critiqued that book. So does that mean my rating was inaccurate? Eventually I realized that that my conflicting feelings about the books I read weren’t the problem; rather, the rating system itself was the issue.
For a while I toyed with the idea of creating a rating system that would allow for a greater degree of variation and clarity. Maybe I should rate books out of 10 instead of 5? Or just use more half stars? Or do a sort of letter grade thing like in school? But I figured that no matter how flexible I tried to make my rating system, it would always fall short of describing how I actually felt about what I read.
So I decided to do away with rating books entirely.
I stopped including ratings in my book reviews, and even stopped rating books on Goodreads. And it was honestly the best decision. I feel like I have so much more freedom in my book reviews now to show all my nuanced, conflicting thoughts instead of just the ones that “justified” whatever rating I gave that book. Now I don’t have to worry about rating one book in relation to another, or trying to fit all the books I’ve read into this sliding scale of ratings in my head. I just read books and write about what I thought of them. Simple, short, and sweet.
Do you rate books? What kind of rating system do you use? Let me know in the comments section below!
Yours,
HOLLY
nut free nerd 
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