Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The trouble is that you're never going to get consistency between the way that people rate books. In a 5-star rating system, I'd give a rating of 3 stars (ie the average rating) to a book which is competently written, with no obvious flaws or errors, but with nothing that made it stand out from the crowd. ie nothing that makes it better than or worse than the average; that allows me to reserve 4- and 5-star ratings to books which are truly exceptional. I know many people, however, will give a 5-star rating to a book they enjoyed, even if they don't consider it to be truly exceptional, and would regard a 3-star rating as a negative rating.
You can really only compare your own ratings; other people may not use the rating system at all the way that you use it.
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Yes exactly, I've seen people give 5 stars to books they've acknowledged were deeply flawed but that they loved anyway, and others who base the rating purely on the book's competence. I try to use a combination of the two, but it does lean more towards how the book made me feel.