2020: The Year of No Star-Ratings

Hindsight is 20/20 as they always say, and let me tell you, I’ve been trying to figure out how to turn that into some kind of personal challenge for 2020 for ages. In the end, the answer was easy and the eagle-eyed among you might have noticed in my January reading wrap-up… I don’t want to give star-ratings for books for a full year and see how it changes my reading and blogging.

There are a couple of reasons why I want to do this:

1. For the past few years, star ratings have gotten harder and harder to give. I’ll finish a book and be overthinking about if I should rate a book three or four, did I like it as much as X which I gave four stars, but it didn’t teach me anything like Y which I gave three. What was originally an impulse decision based on how much I enjoyed a book has become overly-complicated.

2. I’m trying to be less negative. I started book blogging to boost books I loved and lately I feel like I’ve become a real grump. I’ve become too critical to the point where I’m not enjoying reading as much because my brain is too busy thinking about star-ratings and reviews. Maybe it’s the English Literature degree, but I need to re-evaluate a lot of things in 2020 and I think taking away this small thing will help with that.

3. My average star rating in 2019 was three stars. That’s terrible. And I read some good books in 2020! I want to focus more on the books and less on the numbers, so I hope this will help! I’ve always liked star ratings, I’ve never understood why some people don’t use them, but they’ve stopped working for me and I’m ready to try something new.

The only time I’m going to rate a book is if it belongs on my six-star shelf and I know it in my bones. If a book changes my life, my sheets and cleans the litter box, it’ll get this rating.