Rating Books

I keep going back on how I do my book rating for a review. A while ago I came up with a very common 5-star system with a broad description of what they mean to me. I realized that not everyone can cut out a lot of time for reading books (hello new parents), but that doesn't mean they shouldn't read at all. If I wre very low on time available I would want a review to really tell me if it's worth a read or not. I reserve 5 stars to books that are either beautifully written or have a plot that gets better with every re-read (fiction mostly), or books that have so much value in them that they can be life changing/mind expanding (non-fiction).

As I tend to read non-fiction books around a similar topic, it's simpler for me to determine which ones are worth anyone's attention. I dedicated some time last year reading about learning and mastering any skill in life. I picked the list of books based on recommendations (e.g. "If you want to learn about learning read these books"), reviews, and books that stood the test of time. The intersection of these gave me a good list that kept me quite busy for half of 2023.

I came out of this personal challenge with a pretty clear understanding of the importance of mastering something (from cooking, to writing or coding), learning, and how to use the latter to get to the former. It's expected that certain notions and ideas are shared across all the books I read, to the point that I could easily eliminate some of them and still come out on top. The problem is that not many people tell you which ideas are strongly connected across books to the point that reading just one of them means you can skip the other.

Very few were worth a re-read and I still haven't decided how I want to go about re-reading books on a given topic. What I know though is that if you don't have much time and you still want to learn about learning or mastering techniques, you might not be able to extract 1 or 2 books from my list and most of them seem worth your time. They are not. I might expand my reviews and group books I read on a certain topic with one or tow picks that sit at the top. Those will be the books worth your time that you should re-read again and again.

Thoughts

I think I'll keep by reviews section as it is and add a special highlight after I completed the exploration of a topic. I might create a new section dedicated to topics I dug in with the list of books I read about it. Technically you can extract that list from my reviews but since I read multiple books at a time you might have to jump around a bunch. This will be a good exercise for me too! Stopping and deeply thinking about "If I could only pick one or two books about this topic, which ones would I pick?" can better set me up from when the re-reading will happen. As a bonus I might help someone else out there finding a way to spend their time more efficiently.

Ugh yes, for some of the books you can read summaries you find online, I'm not the biggest fan of those but to each their own.