The Zen Leaf

My years of book blogging look like a bell curve: starting with a lower number of books read per year, rising steadily for several years, and then slowly dropping back down. The peak of that curve was in 2010, a year during which I read 217 books. It was also the year where my interest in publicly blogging about books started to wane, due both to outside influence (*coughNYTimescough*), and the way I was reading that year.

Guilt-reading. Looking back over my list of titles read in 2010, it’s sad for me to see that probably 75% of my reading that year carried the label of “should” or “supposed to.” I read very few books that I wanted to read, because I was so busy reading books that:

1. everyone else loved and said I should read
2. someone specifically recommended to me, thinking I’d love
3. were given to me for review
4. had been on my shelf so long that I felt I needed to read them soon
5. fit a specific criteria (POC, LGBTQ, from certain countries, etc)

The result of this kind of reading is that I got completely turned off reading in general. While I kept going at this ridiculous pace (an average of 18 books per month, with an all-time high of 27 books in April that year…), I no longer enjoyed the process of reading books, much less writing about them afterwards. It was the beginning of the end for me, carrying over into the first 4-5 months of 2011 before I finally let go of all the obligations that kept me from reading only what I wanted to read.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy any books I read in 2010. Some of my very favorite books came from that year. Little Children. Germinal. Sonnets from the Portuguese. Notes on a Scandal. The Monk. And more. It was also the year I discovered the joy of audiobooks with Hardy’s Return of the Native (which remains my all-time favorite review ever). It’s just that these gems – all books I read because I wanted to, rather than because I should – were buried among dozens and dozens of guilt-reads. And that’s not cool. I am happy to say that I’ve outgrown guilt-reading, and hope never to repeat a year like 2010, despite the periodic gems.

Last week in my Sunday Coffee post, I talked about how my impressions of books tend to change over time. I wanted to sort of continue that talk, specifically with regards to ratings.

Ratings are a really easy way to blanket-classify one’s feelings for a book. They can be given on any sort of scale (stars, caterpillars, mustaches…) and at any range of level (half-stars, quarter stars…). Everyone that uses them seems to have their own system for them. When they’re used, it’s easy to see at a glance what a person thinks of a book. Right?

I have a complicated history with ratings. Back when I first started reviewing books (2008), I never even thought about ratings. Then, getting to know other book bloggers, I saw ratings everywhere, and I wanted them, too. (No, I have no idea why. It just seemed exciting at the time.) When I moved away from my group blog and to my own personal book blog, I began using them. I got a Goodreads account, and put my ratings there as well – though I was annoyed that it didn’t allow half-stars.

While others debated the rating process, I was happy to keep going with my personal system – until late 2009, when I reviewed Born on a Blue Day. For the first time, a book seemed impossible to rate. Should I rate on technical skill? Subject? Personal enjoyment? Some combination? How could I give a star-rating to a book that was essentially a person’s viewpoint of their own life and neurological issues? I wrote a Sunday Salon post about it not long afterwards (sadly lost now), and sometime after, stopped rating books on my blog (though not on Goodreads).

For the next few years, I rated on Goodreads but not on my blog. When I created my private book journal, I added the ratings back in, along with a page to sort books by rating (the same way I have pages to sort by author and title). I got annoyed periodically when my initial star-rating would change, and I’d have to rearrange my pages and tags, but mostly, I just rated the books automatically. When I decided to go public again, I didn’t include ratings here because I was uncomfortable blanket-classifying books as one-star or two-star books. For me, low ratings meant that I didn’t like the book or took issue with the book, but did that really mean the book was only worth one star? It felt mean/rude to make that statement, because it was just too simple. As I said above, everyone has their own way of rating, and “one-star” might mean something completely different to me than someone else who happens upon one of my “one-star” ratings.

As I’ve been transferring reviews from private to public, I’ve noticed, as I said last week, that my feelings for a book will often change over time. I might rate something low only to love the book over time, and vice versa. I initially gave The Cellist of Sarajevo five stars, because it really touched me when I first read it, but six months later, I could barely remember the book, and it faded to a just-okay three stars in my mind. The exact opposite happened with Never Let Me Go. Feelings for a book are very mutable, and thus ratings change over time. I wouldn’t want my ratings to reflect only my initial thoughts, but I also don’t want to go back and change them. So that’s another point against them.

Then there are those books that I’m very conflicted about. I read a book near the end of last year called Born of Illusion. (I’m not linking back to it because I’ve got the review password protected, as it’s less of a review and mostly a discussion of writing technique stuff I want to remember for my own writing.) I noted at the time that the writing was excellent, but at the same time, I felt no spark or connection to the book. That doesn’t mean someone else wouldn’t. I just didn’t. So do I give a higher rating, for it being well-executed, or a lower one, for my personal disconnect? Or somewhere in between, not really saying anything at all?

These are all things I’ve been thinking about lately. I’ve grown very uncomfortable with star-ratings for all these reasons. Uncomfortable enough that I’ve actually gone and cleared all my 900+ ratings from Goodreads. I have other ways to indicate my feelings about a book – reviews, tags – that are far more accurate and nuanced than a simple rating can ever be.

(My pjs and mustache kinda match this morning…)

It has been a really busy week, and a hard one, fraught with insomnia and so many school functions to attend that I had little time to recover. In my down moments – what few they were – I didn’t have a lot of mental energy to put into other projects, so I spend that time working on the blog this week. I had an interesting experience doing so.

Back in 2010, I read and reviewed Devilish by Maureen Johnson. I’ve read seven novels by Johnson since discovering her in 2009, and Devilish ranks up among my favorites, perhaps my very favorite. It’s the only one I own, after seeing it recently at a library book sale and snatching it up immediately. My review from 2010, however, is very unsure. I read back through it as I transferred it from my private book journal to this blog, and the whole time, I kept wondering what the heck I’d been thinking. This book is so much fun! Did that just not come out in my review?

Then I got to the end, where I’d tacked on a note when I created my private book journal in spring 2012, almost two years after reading Devilish. “Note: After time passed, this came to be one of my favorite Maureen Johnson books, the one that stuck around most in my memory.” Okay. So I wasn’t crazy. I simply hadn’t liked the book as much when I first read it as I do now.

This isn’t terribly uncommon, I don’t think. (Not specifically with this book, but books in general.) I remember being kinda meh about Never Let Me Go when I first read it, but within six months, it grew into an all-time favorite that I still thought about all the time. There’s the opposite, too, where a book starts as something you enjoy but over time either becomes distasteful or fades away in your mind. I’ve had quite a few reviews I’ve read over as I transfer them, praising a book I either barely remember or remember negatively. Other than a periodic note when my feelings have drastically changed (both Devilish and Never Let Me Go have them, added years ago, not now), I’ve forced myself not to modify my original reviews in any way. (Well, other than correcting obvious typos. Because there’s that.)

Reviews are my first impressions of a book. Reviews and “ratings” (which is an entirely different topic for a different Sunday Coffee) can only say so much, unless added to or changed over time, and I hesitate to make those changes. I like having a book journal to record those first impressions, so that I don’t forget a book or the initial experience of reading it. Sometimes, though, I wish to go back and revisit a book, and then update my review, or at least add on “revisited” thoughts. (I actually have done this a couple times over the years, like with We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.)

You’d think it would be simple: like a book, don’t like a book. But it’s not. It speaks to how powerful a book can be, how strongly it can affect someone, when impressions and feelings over time can be altered, even without ever revisiting said book.