November 15, 2020
So I was a bad girl. I got through G's explanation of how she used her rating system, downloaded the file and went to town. I didn't bother to finish watching the video where she explains how to use the Google Drive file.
Meaning, that when I downloaded it to use in Excel, I broke it. I broke the stats sheet. Bad girl.
This is why the sheet wasn't populating like others said it did, let alone how G intended it to work. Ooops! My bad.
As I've shared before, I have never completed a Goodreads reading challenge. Granted, this is only my 3rd year participating, but after the summer I spent as a teen reading 50 books every two weeks... I kept thinking I could do better. I forgot about adulting.
In 2018, I read 57 of the 100 I wanted to, and the only reason I got to 47 of the 50 I pledged in 2019 was because of audiobooks and LeVar Burton reading me short stories on his podcast... I made a pledge in 2020 using logic. I determined that I could probably read about 5 books a month, totaling 60 for the year. That was more than last year, but breaking it down by the month, like a monthly goal, it didn't seem so daunting.
I have had a very difficult time coming up with an objective way to subjectively rate books I have read for many years. I recognize that rating a book, particularly fiction, is unadulteratedly a subjective exercise. A book that I absolutely adore is going to be seen as little better than trash by someone else and vice versa.
However, I also felt that just using the EGM (Enjoyment or Emotional Gut-based Method) right after reading it resulted in a lot of books getting ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ratings from me. Books that should have probably received ⭐️⭐️⭐️ or ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ were being unfairly lumped in up with the truly greats.
The EGM has now caused problems as my tastes aged and changed, as well as my ever deepening appreciation and understanding of what were actually just good books and what were outstanding books. That gut of mine previously rated a book ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ but that one is no where near as good as this book I just read! They can’t both be 5s!
So for the past 2 days, I have fruitlessly scoured the Internet for guidance on how to create my own rating system. What categories are other readers using to base their ratings on? What criteria do others require for the individual stars they give?
Everywhere I turned, people explained how they broke down their EGM into the 5-star system. I need a bit more guidance than that. I need a set of categories or checklists so I know I’m being uniform in my assessments.
