SciFi and Fantasy Challenge 2014

[Kim]

Sarah wrote: "Kim, what were your two one star ones?"

I know a lot of people will disagree but they were Red Mars and 1Q84. If a book is so bad that I can't finish it, even after multiple attempts, it's an automatic one star.

[Penny]

I'm not quite finished, but I'm close! I'm reading Oryx and Crake as my final challenge book which will take me up to 56 books read for the challenge and 100 books read from our bookshelf :) I doubt I'll ever manage to read all the books on our bookshelf as Kim has, but I'm far closer now than I was at the beginning of the year.

Of the 55 books read so far, my stats are:

28 5 star reads
17 4 star reads
5 3 star reads
5 2 star reads
0 1 star reads

11 female authored books read which means 20% of the books I read for the challenge (so far) were written by women.

I guess I'm rather generous with the 5 star ratings, but I only give those to books I loved and I have to say I've read so many amazing books this year. This challenge has been really wonderful. I'm really enjoying my final challenge book Oryx and Crake so far too, so that might end up being another 5 star rating :P

[Maggie]

I read 21, if i remembe right, 5 or 6 were women. My only 5 star was Pump Six and Other Stories

[Sarah]

Kim wrote: "Sarah wrote: "Kim, what were your two one star ones?"

I know a lot of people will disagree but they were Red Mars and 1Q84. If a book is so bad that I can't finish it,..."

I want to read those two so badly and I really hope I enjoy them! I feel your pain about most people not agreeing with you, though. My one stars were Stranger in a Strange Land, I Am Legend, and Foundation. I think most people would disagree. The first two I hated with a passion. Stranger took me about twice as long as it needed to to actually read it because I kept miraculously finding other stuff that really "needed" to be done. Legend only took me two and a half hours to read and I still went from "This is kinda cool" to "You are evil and must be destroyed" in that time.

Penny, I also tend to be generous with the 5 stars. I hate that stupid "It was amazing" tag. Define amazing, right? It's ridiculous. I've gotten a bit more conservative but if I really love a book then it's earned it's 5 stars. Especially if it makes me cry ;)

Maggie, I've been avoiding Pump Six. Maybe I should move it up my queue?

[Maggie]

It is so good as in thought inspiring, but it is dark dark dark

[Maggie]

I hated Stranger in a Strange Land too

[Sarah]

Yay! Someone in my in person book group recommended it and I'm wondering how I'm going to tell him I hate it.

[Chris]

I actually gave 3 stars to Stranger years after the reading (when I joined GR) because it seemed that I liked it alright. But then when I think of reading it again or picking up another Heinlein, I get an icky feeling in my stomach.

[Sarah]

I loved The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but I'm supposed to read Friday and I'm very hesitant. Icky is a good word to describe the way Stranger made me feel.

[Michael]

Sarah wrote: "50% five stars is pretty amazing. I wish it could always be that way. I've discovered Fuzzy Nation and The Sparrow, though, and they were both ones that will become favorites. More to come, perhaps? "

I've tried to focus on only reading books I think I will like and that has been improving my 5 star frequency. Besides spending more time looking at the reviews, one of my strategies is to find as many people as I can who have an 80% or above "compatibility rating" and see how they rated the books. ("compare books" on someone's profile page). You've got to find a lot of people, though, to have any hope of getting ratings on all the books on your list. And of course that won't be 100% predictive, but it has helped me cross some off my list.

[Chris]

Sarah wrote: "I loved The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but I'm supposed to read Friday and I'm very hesitant. Icky is a good word to describe the way Stranger made me feel."

I probably wouldn't have even read Stranger in a Strange Land if it wasn't the same name as an Iron Maiden song. Heh. Which means I should read Number of the Beast.

Then again, I also didn't care for Seventh Son, which I read for the same reason. I'm thinking that wasn't a good way to pick books. Hehe

[Sarah]

Chris, I think you may be right!

I seem to keep running across fairly low compatibility ratings lately. 70-80%.

[Michael]

Sarah wrote: "Chris, I think you may be right!

I seem to keep running across fairly low compatibility ratings lately. 70-80%."

I use my 5 star books and compare everyone who rated them 5 stars in the reviews. It takes a bit of work, but I usually get a few high compatibility per book...

[Sarah]

I was looking at the compare books thing the other day between me and a friend of mine. Then I hit "Compatibility test" and it showed me percentages. She is not a person to read sci-fi and fantasy but when I was looking at the scores, it showed as 100% compatible in sci-fi. I'm going !?!?!?!?. It turns out we had both marked two books as "want to read". That was why it was 100%! I really laughed.

[Edwin]

I have never been too sure of how much to rely on this compatibility thing. A few discrepant ratings seems to throw off the whole compatibility rating.

I find that most of the books that make it to this group's bookshelf here are pretty darned good, and I have never rated anything I have read here below 3. Or maybe I am just too easy to please.

[Michael]

Sarah wrote: "I was looking at the compare books thing the other day between me and a friend of mine. Then I hit "Compatibility test" and it showed me percentages. She is not a person to read sci-fi and fantas..."

It is confusing partly because there are two different tests. The first is when you click on the "compare books" link, and says something like "Your tastes are xx% similar for the books you both rated." That is the one I use. The second test is when you get to that page and then click "book compatibility test". Like Sarah, I think the results are a little wacky sometimes and I don't use it.

For the "compare books" link, which I use, it can also seem a little wacky if you don't know what it is doing. I worked all this out a year ago when I was obsessed with it. It takes the difference between your rating and the other person for each book and assigns a value: If you both rate 5, it is given 100%. If you are 1 star apart (4 vs 5, or 3 vs 4, etc.) then it is given 75%. For differences of 2, 3, and 4, the values are 50%, 25%, and 0%, respectively. The total "similar tastes" value is the average of all those values. (i.e. the only way to get 100% is to rate all of the books you have in common exactly the same.)

The problem is that it only does this for 100 books, apparently selected at random (the ones displayed on the page). So if you both have a lot of unrated to-reads in common, you will get a similarity based on only a few of your rated books, which will be meaningless, and can change each time you do a comparison! The way I avoid that is by selecting "read" in the "common shelves" drop down list. That way it will ignore all of your to-read books. You'll still have a problem if you both have rated more than 100 books in common, but it improves the results tremendously.

[Sarah]

I never realized it limited to 100. Thanks for the tip on doing "read" books. The to-read books can impact the results.

[Valerie]

My goal was 20 books. I actually read 29, so I came in at 145% of goal.

As for the stats on what I read:

8 five star
14 four star
7 three star

Like Michael, I chose to read books that I thought I would like.

9 by female authors (31%)

Favorite: Mistborn: The Final Empire
Least Favorite: The Island of Dr. Moreau

Still on progress (I may or may not finish them by year's end):

Watchmen
The Killing Moon

[Aaron]

currently read 122, going to finish a few more probably.

16 five stars
53 four stars
37 three stars
11 two stars
5 one stars (plus 1 DNF)

giving an average rating this year of 3.53/5.

29 written by women...probably going to be 30 by the end of the year.

but that's a 23.8% female author rate so about average.

I still havn't found someone I have crazy compatability with yet on this site, though I can tell you from experience on other sites(cough anime) that if you hit 90%+ with someone that they will pretty much agree with you on everything and even if you disagree on ratings you will agree with their reasoning.

[Sarah]

I have a friend that our taste in teen books is almost identical. It runs into other books, too. I've asked her to read The Martian so I know at least one other person who doesn't like it. People with very similar ratings are quite rare in my experience. I'm lucky if I get above 80%.

[Penny]

Just finished Oryx and Crake and with that I've completed my challenge! :D I wasn't sure I'd make it but I did :)

Congrats to all those who managed to complete their challenges this year, and to those who didn't - there's always next year! Hope you all have an awesome new years :)

[David]

I originally set my challenge at 12 books but just finished #30.

13 5-star books
13 4-star books

Favorite: Assassin's Apprentice
Least Favorite: The Lathe of Heaven

Look forward to doing it again in 2015!

[Maarit]

I set my goal to 12 books this year and finished with 14 books and abandoned 2 books.

1 5-star book (The Lies of Locke Lamora)
8 4-star books
4 3-star books
1 2-star book (Gun, With Occasional Music)

The books I abandoned (both were read to about halfway) were Dawn by Octavia E. Butler (not a bad book, just not my style, didn't give a star rating because of it) and Ubik by Philip K. Dick (utterly boring, gave 1 star).

Also I'm currently reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman, but I won't be finishing it this year.

[Michael]

Penny wrote: "Just finished Oryx and Crake and with that I've completed my challenge! :D I wasn't sure I'd make it but I did :)

Congrats to all those who managed to complete their challenges this y..."

Wow, right down to the wire! Congratulations!

[Hillary]

After reading everyone's stats, I thought I'd take a look at mine. First, I decided to be a little less strict in how I categorized challenge books (originally, I had excluded some books that were also read w/other groups), so I upped my number read from 12 to 15.

read 15 (goal 12)

3 4-stars (The Sparrow, Embassytown, A Scanner Darkly)
12 3-stars

1/3 (5 books) by women authors

I tend to be a fairly tough rater; to earn better than a 3, a book needs to really stand out from the pack & stick with me over time. I do consider 3/"liked it" a good rating -- I'd enthusiastically recommend many of my 3s (I think elements other than an overall personal rating, esp. the reader's preferences/interests should factor more into recommendations). I find myself sometimes upping a star score weeks or months after the fact for a book that's kept me thinking (just did this with A Scanner Darkly, which wasn't exactly what I expected but was a standout in my 2014 reading). My 5-stars tend to be favorites with personal significance, although looking over my history, it seems like some years I'm just more open to 5-stars than others (maybe more generous star ratings should be a 2015 resolution).

[Julia]

I read 162 books in 2014.

Four of them were from the list. All four were 5 stars.

I read 31 other science fiction novels, 14 of them were by women.