Rating System

What’s in a star?

When I attempt to informally assign a number of stars to a book I just finished, I often find myself thinking “I loved this book so much, but I would not consider it to be one of my Best Books Ever.” To align with this thinking, I generally give books I read 4 stars. This rating is especially common for me because I choose the books I want to read and have a pretty good sense of what I can expect to like.

I find the standard 5-star scale to be particularly lacking when it comes to rating genres I do not normally read. I recently enjoyed a few YA novels, but it’s hard for me to communicate how much I enjoyed them compared to other YA novels.

To address this ambiguity, I came up with the following rating system that not only helps me clarify what rating I should give in the standard 5-star scale, but also provides more transparency to you of what went into a seemingly simple rating.

The Banana Rating System

I break down the standard components of literature and order their importance (to me) by genre. This table is best viewed on a desktop, but the full table along with the implementation of the rating system can be found here. The abbreviations used are Language (Lang.), Characters (Char.), and Information (Info.).

Genre	Most Important					Least Important
Fiction	Lang.	Char.	Theme	Plot	Setting	Info.
Short Stories	Lang.	Theme	Plot	Char.	Setting	Info.
Essays	Argument	Lang.	Theme	Info.	Char.	Setting
Narrative Nonfiction	Info.	Plot	Argument	Lang.	Setting	Char.
Nonfiction	Info.	Argument	Lang.	Char.	Setting	Plot
Memoirs	Lang.	Theme	Char.	Info.	Plot	Setting
Young Adult	Char.	Plot	Theme	Lang.	Setting	Info.
Fantasy	Plot	Char.	Setting	Theme	Lang.	Info.
Romance	Plot	Char.	Emotion	Setting	Lang.
Thriller	Plot	Char.	Setting	Lang.	Theme
Poetry	Lang.	Theme	Emotion	Structure

Of course, categorizing books into narrow genres is difficult and sometimes impossible. I first go with the advertised genre if available. If that seems inadequate or it is unavailable, I use my best judgement.

Once a book is categorized, I rate each of the components on a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 being the most favorable rating. I then compute a weighted average, putting more weight on the more important categories and correspondingly less weight on the less important categories. These weights and their calculation can be found here.

Finally, I round to the nearest integer to assign a star that can be used in Goodreads.

Extreme overkill? Thoughts on the construct of genre components? Let me know below!