rate this

A word about ratings:

I kind of have my own way of standardizing how I rate items. I kind of discovered this on IMDB, though their system is still pretty faulty. I've noticed that to some people a 6 is a terrible rating, and for others, it's not so bad. So what I do is make 5 completely neutral; I didn't like it, I didn't dislike it. If something I'm reviewing was slightly less than pleasurable for me to read, then it might get a 3 or 4. If I really really enjoyed something overall, but there were some parts that lost my interest or certain elements of the book weren't as good as they possibly could have been, it might get an 8 or 9. In only reserve perfect 10s for my absolute favorite books of all time. I figure that throughout my lifetime, there should only be a handful of 10s ever given out. And as I said earlier, my ratings can change dramatically through time (most movies shoot into my Top 5 while I'm still watching them). I'm pretty pliable when it comes to my opinions (I suppose to a fault), so I'm somewhat willing to give out more 10s than I otherwise would because I know that one of them will probably bump another one down (make sense? not really? well shut up).

I suppose it would make more sense if things were rated on a scale from -5 to 5 with 0 being neutral. That would be the most intuitive way of doing it, but since we're a society based on a base ten numeral system (Mario Livio's book The Golden Ratio has a great section on base number systems. I think it was some Egyptian society that had a base of 64...or something like that. Crazy.) most people feel comfort in having things be out of ten, or some power of ten like percentages (percent: per one hundred, you get the idea).

Generally speaking, I would recommend most books with ratings of 6 or higher.