I know, you’re disappointed. I’m grateful (and quite frankly stunned) that you so highly value and trust in my ratings! 

But the pandemic hit and I just couldn’t do it anymore. No focus. My brain was all over the place, and so overloaded I literally did not have the bandwidth to decide if a book was three stars or five. My focus and ability to judge has returned somewhat, but I’m happier without the stars. I’m sorry. 

I get why everyone likes them, they’re a quick shortcut. They seem to give a lot of information at a glance. But they’ve always been problematic.

Ostensibly they are a measure of how much I “liked” a book. But what does that mean? How much I was entertained by it? What its literary or editorial level of quality is? How much I learned from it? How much it moved me, emotionally? How true it is? How valuable it is? How wide an appeal I imagine it would have to you guys? 

Those things are very different, and most of them I’m not even qualified to judge – yet I was trying to capture them ALL at the same time with one little number. And that would stress me out. Even in the Before Times.

Sometimes I would start with one number in mind because of some of those things, then take off a star for others. Lots of books got fives, despite having flaws. Lots got only fours, because despite my loving them they just weren’t “that type” of book. Some got twos, because they just weren’t for me, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t for you. On some days I felt like giving half-stars and on others I felt like rounding. Over time I would tend to give the first book I read on a subject a five cuz it blew my mind, and then others on the same topic got fewer – were they worse books or was I just no longer shocked by the ideas? What the hell do you do with books that are on some pages five stars and on others three stars – they aren’t four stars. And OF COURSE how I feel about a book on one day could be very different from how I feel about it a day later or a year later or a decade later, when my knowledge and my mood and the zeitgeist have changed. 

How were you supposed to know the convoluted criteria by which I was judging – my inner rubric on any given day? You couldn’t possibly! You’re not mind readers.

So I considered either instituting a multi-aspect rating system – getting way more complex – or scrapping the stars altogether. 

Bye bye, stars. 

Maybe they’ll be gone forever. Maybe they’ll come back, in some form or another. 

In the meantime, the comments are key. You can usually tell my level of enthusiasm by the comments. (They’re still only one snapshot in time.) I purposely don’t do deep-dive reviews, or give long plot summaries. All I mean to do is maybe pique your interest enough to look up more about the book and decide for yourself if you want to read it.