Solving My Biggest Problem Related to Book Reviewing
Trying to discuss novels as an avid reader is almost like trying to hold an in-depth conversation about your native language with someone learning it for the first time.
Rating a book seems like such an inconsequential part of a book review. Some people, especially if they’re not posting the review to Goodreads or The Story Graph, omit ratings entirely. I’m not someone who can pull ratings out of my head offhand, I never have been. And because I couldn’t do it, I obsessed over it. It always seemed like these people who could offhandedly rate a book knew novels on a deeper level than I did, or at least, knew their own tastes better than me. On the outside looking in, it always seemed like they were divining star ratings like an oracle would divine the future, that there was some magical background processing that was going on that I didn’t have access to.
This feeling is primarily what stalled the beginning of my blog for ten years or so. I stopped and started multiple times, setting aside time and/or money to buy a domain, to design a website, to make lists of all the topics I’d want to research and explore (the most recent list I found was about 84 topics long), but I never could quite overcome this idea that I didn’t know about what I wanted to talk about, at least on any deeper meaningful level, since I couldn’t rate what I read in a way that made sense to me. I couldn’t say that every three star book was a three star book for these reasons and that there was reasoning and logic behind every rating that could be replicated time and time again with everything I read. And since I couldn’t do that, I felt like I couldn’t articulate what made good books good or bad books bad. I needed a way to understand the features of a novel so that I could break a book down into its component parts and analyze each one and to do so, I needed to deeply understand each feature … which felt like an insurmountable task. There didn’t seem to be anyone doing this deep work that I desired to learn from as a book reviewer, or at least, I felt like I couldn’t find it. And to compound the issue, I didn’t feel like I could even start reviewing books until I reached this level of enlightened mastery that I felt other people had achieved.
I was stuck. And to be fair, it was entirely my fault—my desire for miraculous fully-formed perfection, rather than natural progression has killed many a hobby for me, this one in particular just the most notable one (with learning how to draw and learning Japanese following in close succession). It’s to the point where sometimes, it feels like my hobby isn’t reading, but rather making everything much, much harder for myself than it needs to be. I had a goal of being able to review and analyze books, but I couldn’t start reviewing books until I figured out how to accurately score books, and to accurately score books I had to have a mastery of everything from characterization to novel organization, which—I couldn’t figure out how to do. So for ten years or so I languished, wanting to do this one thing perfectly (review and analyze books) but unable to do so until I did the equivalent of what felt like trying to climb Mt. Everest with every avenue of entry blocked off. I tied myself into knots, adding more and more tasks to complete until I collapsed under the weight of them all and gave up entirely … until this year.
I don’t know how it came to me exactly, but the solution to rating books (for me at least) was really quite simple. Of course, because it is me, I immediately made it more complicated than it needed to be, but now I had actionable starting points, rather than nebulous, ever-changing goals. It began with a sort of eureka moment. Why couldn’t I create a rubric, like the one that teachers use to grade papers? This would satisfy my desire for some kind of standardization, which I realize now is what confused me so much about offhand ratings. How could we be sure that one three star book is being rated the same as another three star book? A rubric solves that issue for me.
Then came the issue of what exactly to include in my rubric. I referenced a few rubrics that I found for classes online (here and here), but it didn’t feel like enough. Of course, once I started, I couldn’t stop and before I knew it, I had 22 elements to rate on a scale of 1 to 5.
Now that I had a rubric, I needed the criteria on how to rate it from 1 to 5. Here’s where it gets complicated, as per usual for me. How do I articulate what gets 1 star versus 5 stars in each category? I was still held up by my desire to hold an enlightened mastery of literature and every element of it, but at least now I had some direction of where to go, rather than just anxiety about my perceived lack of knowledge.
Having topics in hand, I could do what I do best, other than making things difficult for myself—research. It’s easy to learn about something when you have direction, which I now did. I decided to go the route of reading books aimed towards authors on the craft of writing. In reading these, I would be able to understand what made good characterization (or any other element), good and therefore be able to extrapolate from that what makes bad characterization, bad. I would have criteria for the most extremes of the rating scale and from there, I could more easily fill out the middle of the spectrum. To ensure that the rubric was short and succinct (a problem I ran into when trying to articulate what I define as good characterization), I decided to create separate blog posts dedicated to each element included within my rubric, to further elucidate on my rating spectrum, as well as my perspective on the craftsmanship behind each element. I’ll probably revisit each element as I get further into my blogging journey, but for now, I’m able to have a solid starting point and articulate if a novel does well with crafting a certain element or not, which I struggled with before. I may even choose to add more to my book reviewing rubric in the future, but for now here’s my list of elements (and their complimentary blog posts) below:
- Page Turner
- Characters
- Protagonist
- Antagonist
- Romantic Lead
- Romantic Development
- Eroticism
- Relationship Development
- Setting
- Plot
- Worldbuilding
- Prose
- Style/Voice
- Conflict
- Climax
- Resolution
- Dialogue
- Word Choice
- Storytelling
- Organization
- Originality
- Personal Enjoyment
Of course, not every book I review will have a romantic lead and not every book that has a romantic lead will have erotic scenes, but if they cropped up, I wanted a way to score them. Looking at my list, I suppose it’s not entirely standardized all the way if I remove three elements when reviewing a book with no romance which means the total points achievable would be different for these books versus books with romance and so on and so forth, but no scale can accurately measure everything—and what I have is better than the nothing that I had before that caused so much imposter syndrome-fueled anxiety. It’s a start. I had to continually remind myself throughout this process that this was just the start of my book reviewing journey. I didn’t have to have everything figured out, I didn’t have to keep adding dependent tasks to my project, I didn’t have to compare myself to people who had been writing about books longer than I had been contemplating the same. It can be messy and it can be imperfect and that’s okay! I learned what I needed to learn and I can keep learning as I continue this journey. For now, I’m happy with my little rubric and I’m happy with the preliminary research I’ve done. It will probably change as I change and as this blog evolves, and I’d like to do the equivalent for comics, film, and TV, but here’s what I have so far:
I am probably more proud of this little project than it most likely deserves, but for me it represents overcoming an obstacle that’s plagued me for a ridiculously long time. What makes one book three stars and another book three stars? What about half stars? How do I quantify something that appears to happen off-hand for others? Maybe I can’t do it the way others do it, but I can create a system that works for me, that eliminates that confusion and anxiety—and I did, and I’m proud of it.