3 ways to decide a book’s rating

If you’re anything like me, sometimes you finish a book but have no idea how many stars to give it. At times you are not even sure whether you actually liked the book or not. Happens with me really often. So of course you rate a book according to the plot, the character-building, the world-building and all that, but here are 3 weird unique but effective ways (tried and tested by me!) to decide whether you really enjoyed reading the book or not.

I decided to start with the weirdest one first😂. So what you have to do is, keep the book you are reading aside for some time, and sit some distance away from it. Then you may or may not feel a sort of ‘pull’ coming from the book. I know it sounds totally crazy, but listen to me completely. It doesn’t have to be you staring at the book across you in a creepy manner. It can be you doing something else, and then the extent of the feeling of how much you want to go back and continue reading the book, will determine whether you are enjoying the book or not. Like, for nearly all the books in the KOTLC series, I just couldn’t bring myself to do anything else, the ‘pull’ of the book was so strong. That’s how I knew the series deserved five stars.

Another way to decide the rating is to note how many times you got distracted while reading the book. If you get distracted frequently, means you are probably not enjoying the book very much. When I was reading the Divergent series, I was so completely engrossed in it that I kept reading for hours without a pause (that’s unusual for me, as I generally read for short time spans, many times a day), and I don’t think I would even have noticed if an earthquake occurred beneath me then (thank god it didn’t😅). This way of rating helped me a lot, because after finishing the first book, I was totally lost, and had no idea whether I loved it or not. But looking at the way it kept me engaged told me that I loved it and should rate it 5 stars.

The third way I use to rate books is I check how much I remember the story after finishing the book. I don’t mean immediately after you finish the book, but after a couple of hours, or a day. This shows how deep of an impact the book has left on you. Sometimes, the day after I finish a book, I can’t remember much of the plot, no matter how hard I rack my brains. So even if a felt I liked the book a lot, I don’t give it full 5 stars, I settle for a 4 maybe.

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That was it for this post! So now you finally know how I rate my books😉. Hopefully these methods will help you rate books too.

P.S. – I made my first attempt at writing fanfiction in my previous post (An epilogue to the Six Of Crows duology!), and that too for the Six of Crows duology! Do check it out and leave some feedback!

Do you use any of these methods to rate books? If not, on what basis do you rate books? Let me know in the comments!