The Three Review Categories:

Quality of Writing

How well the book is written. This may sound a lot like how well it’s told. It’s not. This category deals with how well an author writes what he is telling. Does he use correct grammar, follow the rules, and generally just look like he knows the English language? Does he adhere to the elements of style? Does he use a lot of exposition when he could be having the character tell us the story? Does he use a lot of adverbs and dialog attribution? For instance, take this sentence: "Holy cow, I’m scared as hell!" the woman said frightfully. We know she said it frightfully. Drop the adverb and the attribution. We don’t need it. We should be able to tell how she is saying it by the context and the situation. Here’s another: "I can’t believe you did that! YOU ARE GONNA PAY FOR THIS, YOU BASTARD!" he screamed loudly, shaking his fists at the evil man standing there facing him. Run on. Unnecessary attribution. Adverb. Breaks the ING rule. After the comma, he could drop the ING off the verb and make that a new sentence, and I’d be happy with the way it was written. Douglas Adams, God rest his soul, I don’t read for his writing. He talks to the reader (a big no-no), he uses adverbs like he got them on clearance at K-Mart, and he exposes a lot of story he could tell with dialog or inner thought. But I love the way he tells his story. Bottom line: Does the author look like he knows how to write the way he would tell the story?

Quality of Storyline

How good is the story? Is it worth telling? Or is it a crappy story, like something about a guy who finds out his mom has leukemia and has to learn how to deal with it. I don’t wanna read about some crap like that. How good the story is accounts (in most cases) for most of the reason I choose to read a book. An example of a bad story is Rage Sleep, by C.W. Morton and Jack Mobley. I swear, I don’t know how this woman got published. It took two of them to write this crap, and it still wasn’t worth reading. Bad story. Bad idea. Bad book. Bottom line: Is the story worth writing a book about?

Quality of Storytelling

How well the author tells the story. Does he cover all the facets? Does he know how to tell it, or does he leave out things I think would be essential to the plot? Some people can take a plain story and make it sound great, just because they adhere to certain standards, and can just simply tell a story the right way. Stephen King is one of these. Most of his books I read not because of the story, but because of how he tells it. Take The Stand for instance. I didn’t think the story was all that great. I’m not really much into haunted houses and horror books, but I read him religiously, because he tells them well. That’s why I endured that laborious 1200-page tome called The Stand. If someone’s got to tell a crappy story, they had better tell it right. Bottom line: Could this author tell me the story and keep me interested without losing me or boring me to death?

Performance of Narrator

On some reviews you may see a Performance rating. This simply tells you what I thought of the narrator in those books where I listened to the audio version. Audiobooks are a big part of my commute to work while riding in the back of a van during carpooling, walking to train stations and bus stops and when I’m driving. So I read quite a few audiobooks a year. This Performance rating has no real impact on the greatness of the story as far as a reader is concerned, if that reader is reading a text-based version. However, if you are listening, or plan to listen to the audiobook, it can heavily influence your experience. I’ve heard bad books made good by a narrator (Pride and Prejudice) and good books made bad by a poor narrator (The Martian Chronicles). So you can ignore this category if you’re reading the text-based version.

The Ten-Step Diamond Scale

Now, armed with these three rules to rating books, I give a basic diamond-rating based on these three categories. No category is more important than another, though if one were to be on top, it would be quality of story. I mix my feelings in all three categories and assign a number of stars to it, one through five, with half-steps.

Don’t miss this one.  Great page-turner, and an excellent read.
Good reading, and hard to put down.  Not the best, but still great.
Good read, but don’t lunge for it.  Get the paperback at Half-Price Books.
Don’t waste your time with these, and definitely don’t buy them.
Stay away from these entirely.  You’d get more enjoyment from a cookbook.

Now you know how I rate my reads. With a ten-point scale assigned to each of the three categories above, then an overall rating, you should get a pretty good idea about whether or not you would like to read the book yourself.

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