Rating books

[Anastasia]

How do you decide what to rate a book?

Specifically how do you rate a memoir?

The memoir I am struggling with is "From the Ashes" by Jesse Thistle. It is very readable. It is a difficult subject; homelessness, drug addiction, in foster system, and being Metis.

How do you go about rating that? It just seems like something that should not be rated at all.

[Robin P, Orbicular Mod]

Are you hesitating because it seems like you are rating the person's life? I guess the question would be how well it did what it set out to do, which might be to make you aware of social problems or to get to know that person. You don't have to enjoy the subject matter. On the other hand, there is no law that says you have to rate every book you read.

[Hannah]

I struggle with this too, sometimes. I recently read a memoir about someone's struggles with OCD (Rewind Replay Repeat: A Memoir of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), which I enjoyed on the whole. However, the second half of the book had a much heavier religious theme than I was expecting, which personally diminished my enjoyment somewhat. When I was thinking about how I would rate it, I felt like a bit of a jerk! This guy was telling the story of his own, real life, in which religion played a big part in him being able to come to terms with his OCD. That's a big difference than a fiction author making a choice I didn't care for with their fictional character. But...that all being said, I did let it affect my rating. I prefer to think of my ratings as representative of my own personal, subjective feelings about a book (how much did I enjoy reading this? How much did I get out of it?) and not an objective judgment of the quality of a book.