my five-star book rating system

15 May, 2026

last modified 1 week, 6 days ago

I am desperately clawing my way out of college and back to my computer. Therefore: easy post this month. By the time I’ve posted this, I’ll probably be done with my first round of exams and about to get hammered by the second one. Please expect my march-through-june absence to become a yearly routine…

I did posts talking about the books I read in 2024 and 2025. (I don’t know if I’ll do one for 2026; I’m not doing any reading challenges this year). In them, I mentioned I have a book rating system. Today, I’ll be explaining it!

I was inspired by some rating systems I’ve seen on the internet, which rank the media being rated based on certain cathegories, assign each cathegory a score, then give an average of said cathegories as the final result.

But I didn’t vibe with most of the cathegories I saw people rate books based on. Mostly, it was because I found them too ambiguous to my upside-down brain: how do I rank the characters of a book on a numerical scale, for example? Do I rank them based on how interesting I find them, or how well-written I think they were, or how much I liked them personally, or how much I was rooting for them…? Or the plot — how do I deliver a rating that isn’t weighted towards the specific types of plots I happen to enjoy? What about books where nothing much happened?

I mean, my cathegories are even more ambiguous and nebulous than the previous ones. I absolutely did not streamline anything, otherwise I wouldn’t be making an explainer post… But I wanted to be able to analyze the elements of a book as I would parcel them out, and not go with something pre-made.

I don’t really think anything can pre-dissect the concept of a “story” in advance for you. Some books don’t have plots. Some books don’t have characters! I’m taking some literary analysis classes right now (for the first time, so you’re about to see me take down all my old posts yapping about a specific work of fiction at length¹) and our focus so far has been on things related to the “form” of the book — how the narrator speaks, how the events of the story unfold, the words the author chooses to describe things. I think getting too stuck on “what elements a story should have” is what leads to the bad reputation of genre fiction… A story doesn’t have “ingredients” you put in a bowl and whisk until combined. It just has words. You put one word after the other, and after enough words, something happens. Nothing else is known!

Anyway… after all that pretentiousness, here’s my goofy little system.

I went with the acronym “CAIRN”. A cairn is a small pile of stones erected as a marker out in the wilderness. It’s also a very pretty word. It's also the name of a tabletop roleplaying game I've ran and had fun with. And it has a lot of pretty useful letters in it for expressing my intentions. Plus, it’s five letters, and I rank on five stars, so the math is easier.

Each letter in the acronym represents an aspect of a book. I rate each aspect on a scale from 0 to 5, ish? Or more like, 0,25 to 5,00. So my rankings are a little bit skewed, but I think it’s fine… (The thing is, if any of the aspects drops to an 0, particularly the last one… I stop reading the book!! I don’t finish it!)

C.A.I.R.N. stands for:

• Charm,
• Art,
• Intrigue,
• Resonance,
• and Nope.

So, going one by one, from the top.

“Charm” is, essentially, how much I enjoyed living inside the book. Did I like the characters? Did I find them compelling? Was I going “yesss” like a sicko at the plot developments? Was the constructed world really cool? Or, for nonfiction books: how fascinating was the information provided? Did I devour it greedily and with passion?

“Art” is how compelling I found the book as a work of art. Was the prose evocative? Was it poetic? Was it precise? Did the book pull off a writing technique I was amazed by? How much did the writer impress me with their skills?

“Intrigue” is how caught up I felt on the sequence of events or information portrayed in the book. Was I turning each page with excitement? Did I want to peek ahead? Was I thinking about how it’d continue while I wasn’t reading? Did I keep reading it in inappropriate contexts, like in the middle of class, because it enraptured me more than my lectures? Did I simply have to go through the whole thing in one sitting?

“Resonance” is philosophical. How much did I think this book spoke to a “truth” I could observe? How resonant were the themes and ideas explored? Did I feel like there was something very real going on? Did the author speak with sincerity and vulnerability, not on accident but on purpose?

And “Nope” is a bit the “odd man out” of the cathegories. “Nope” starts out at five stars; every time the book makes me flinch or cringe, I tick the rating down. Once it hits zero, I drop the book.

These cathegories do have overlap, but I designed them to account for a variety of books that might scale high on one cathegory and low on another that I thought would be difficult to rate on a more “traditional” system. For example, imagine a story that I considered a great work of art, but which I struggled through; it would have a high “Art” score, but a low “Intrigue” score. Or imagine I found something with extremely disturbing and unlikeable characters, but which spoke to the truth of the human existence: it would have a high “Resonance” and a low “Charm”. And so on, and so on forth.

(For an example — I distinctly remember Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash as having very high Charm and Resonance and I think good to middling Intrigue, but very low Art and very low Nope, dragging its score down to a little over 2 stars).

This system is far from perfect. The biggest flaw so far is the skewing; I rarely find something perfect on all counts, and I rarely find something atrocious on all counts, and I start the ranking on an 0,25 and not an 0 or a 1, so most of my ratings are somewhere between 2,5 and 4,75 stars. That’s really awkward! I’m sure there’s a math solution to this problem I just don’t know about… I don’t want to brute-force remove 0,25 points out of all my rankings, either. So the annoyance will persist, I think?

But, yeah. I guess send me an email if you have a different ranking system you’d like to talk about? I like hearing about that sort of thing.

And, as always:

Thank you for reading!

P.S.: Check out this text-based Let's Play. I read it recently and really liked it. It felt like a time capsule from fifteen years ago, but it’s a barely six-years-old Let’s Play of an an eight-year-old game. That’s awesome...

#2026 #review #🌕