My Rating System

I’ve seen people talk about how they rate books and how they use the 5 star system on Goodreads. I really enjoy reading those posts and I just realized that I can write my own haha. I don’t use the star system here, but I am on Goodreads (theelvenwarrior if you want to check it out haha) and I do think in a 5 star system most of the time.

I don’t tend to judge books against each other. I mostly judge them on what they are trying to do and how well they do it. The Kiss Quotient was an amazing romance book; I consider it a 5 star romance book. Children Of Blood And Bone is an amazing fantasy book; I consider it a 5 star fantasy book.  I dunno what I’m really trying to say, but I know I had a point.

Anyway, 1 star books. I don’t rate a lot of books 1 stars, mostly because I’ll DNF a book if it’s heading down the route. If I do end up rating a book 1 star, it’ll most likely because something happened at the end to knock stars off. Or if a super problematic book is on Goodreads and I’m letting everyone know that it’s something to stay away from.

2 stars is also on the rarer side for me. I’m not one to stick on a book that I’m not really enjoying and I’m more likely to not finish a 2 star book than anything else. Sometimes I will finish 2 stars books if something is holding me attention enough. An interesting plot point or decent writing for example.

And now on to 3 stars! I’m more likely to finish a 3 star book than DNF it.When I rate a book 3 stars, I enjoyed a good portion of it but I had few problems with it, it just wasn’t for me, or I got bored somewhere in there. If I do rate a book 3 stars, I still liked some of it, I just didn’t love it.

4 stars! For me, 4 stars means I loved it. It’s kinda a big jump for me from 3 stars to 4 stars. My enjoyment level is drastically different between the two. If I rate it 4, I really, really liked it. There might be a few problems I had, but they weren’t two major and they didn’t take away from me reading experience.

And if I rate a book 5 stars I adored it. A lot. I’m a liiiiiiitle stingy when it comes to 5 stars and I will usually scream about that book until I run out of breath. So watch out for those haha. And 5 stars didn’t mean I didn’t have a few minor issues here and there, cause what book is perfect? But they were super minor and what was happening/other things completed overshadowed them and I simply didn’t have time to dwell on my issues.

I also use .5 and .75 stars sometimes. Since Goodreads doesn’t have that option, I will put it at the top of my review along with my spoiler/no spoiler warning. This is mostly because of enjoyment level and for my rating system, 3.75 is a good bit better than 3. I do tend to round down instead of up too. If I find I a book to be 3.5 stars, I put it in as 3 in Goodreads.

I didn’t think I would have this drawn out of a rating system, but I guess a lot of pieces are moving in my head when I think about what to rate a book haha. It is kinda cool to see it all laid out too! I’ll probably update it the second I upload this post, but STILL.

Thank you for reading!