I went back into the (recent) archives and noticed that I hadn't consistently shared the same information in all my reading reviews since the June restart.
Let's fix a few of these omissions today - first, I noticed that my review for The Game did not include a link to my book notes, so here you go. More importantly, I left a few book ratings blank - in fact, since June my completion rate has been under 50%. Here's the catchup:
Strangers In Their Own Land - Three paradoxes out of four
The Empathy Exams - Three social norms out of four
Seeking Wisdom - Three regressions to the mean out of four
100 Essays I Don't Have Time To Write - Three exeunts out of four
As you can see, the TOA book ratings are meant to be taken extremely seriously.
The more important skill is to get in the habit of knowing how to read a review. I think I've improved quite a bit in this regard over the past couple of years (and I hope these gains are reflected in the way I write reading reviews to highlight the strengths of a book). When I'm considering a book, I try to find a couple of reviews that fall in the center of the scale (on Goodreads, this means three stars out of five) because I've learned that this is the most likely place to learn the strengths of a book. This is almost never true of the other reviews - the five-stars tell you what they liked and the one-stars overstay their welcome (message to the boo-birds: the one-star rating is pretty clear, no need to elaborate) - but anyway, neither high or low on the rating scale seems capable of providing an unbiased explanation of what the book does uncommonly well.
What does a book do uncommonly well? It's not a question I hear often, but I feel it should be asked of every published work; what would be the value of knowing anything else? Some strangers telling me they liked (or disliked) a book has no meaning to me; half the country is going to disagree with the other half very soon, with the only remaining question being which half. The three-star review gives me everything I need to know about whether I'll enjoy reading the book.
