How it works
No stars.
A star rating squashes everything about a book into one number. This site keeps the parts separate: a fingerprint that describes the book, a curve that shows how it read, and one verdict that says what I made of it.
The fingerprint
Each line below is a spectrum between two named ends. A book sits somewhere along it. Neither end is the good end, and I only mark what I'm sure of, so a blank line means "no opinion", not "average". Two books with very different fingerprints can both be wonderful; the fingerprint tells you what kind of wonderful.
could be anywhere↔the place is the book
Can you stand somewhere while you read it? Not the historical-fiction genre — the specificity of a nameable, visualizable time and place. Leave blank for a book of ideas or a fable, which are unplaced on purpose.
pressing a case↔just a story
Does the book take a moral position seriously? It doesn't need a villain; moral seriousness is enough. This is the axis that predicts disappointments independently of how good a time you had.
the form does the work↔told straight
Not plot twists — whether the technique enacts the subject. Marie-Laure is blind, so the prose stops being visual.
left me heavier↔left me lighter
What the book left behind, which is not whether you enjoyed it. Plenty of magnificent books are built to leave you wrecked, so neither pole carries a penalty.
reads itself↔makes you work
How fast the sentences go down. A measure of readability, not of quality — and separate from Clarity, since a book can have plain sentences and still lose you completely.
compressed↔stretched
How much book there is for the amount of book. An essay's worth of idea at three hundred pages is non-fiction's most common failure, but fiction stretches too — and paired with low Friction, nobody minds.
easy to hold↔constant bookkeeping
How much work it takes to track who is speaking and where you're standing. McCarthy drops quotation marks and you're never lost; a book of plain sentences with too many narrators loses you at every chapter break.
shows its work↔take it on faith
Sourced and rigorous, or hand-waving. No fiction equivalent, and it matters more than anything else for a book making claims about the world.
Whether I cared about the subject is a fact about me, not the book. Everything on the fingerprint describes the book; what I brought to it goes in the review.
How it read
Three moments, beginning, middle and end, each answering one question: how much did I want to keep reading, right here? Then a fourth mark for what happened after I closed it.
Slow start, picked up, couldn't put it down by the end, and got better in memory afterwards. The classic "stick with it".
- rose
- better in retrospect
- held
- stayed where it landed
- faded
- stopped thinking about it
- soured
- got worse
A book I gave up on draws a curve that just stops, which says more than a "did not finish" label ever could. And "slow first hundred pages, worth it" becomes a shape you can see.
The verdicts
Every book gets exactly one. This is the only place a judgment is recorded, and they aren't ranked against each other: "Glad I read it" isn't a worse "Stayed with me", it's a different outcome.
- Forced on friends
- You didn't recommend it. You made sure they read it.
- Stayed with me
- It lodged, whether or not you'd inflict it on a friend.
- Admired more than enjoyed
- The craft earns respect the experience didn't.
- Great ride, no destination
- All pleasure, nothing at the end. The exact inverse of the shelf above.
- Glad I read it
- No regrets, no evangelism. The biggest shelf, and that's fine.
- Not for me, but not its fault
- Clearly good, clearly someone else's book.
- Lost me
- Couldn't follow it, couldn't stay with it. Absorbs the abandoned ones, since the curve already shows where it stopped.
My taste
Everything I want from a book is a preference, and preferences are kept off the fingerprint on purpose. Otherwise "all the marks on my favourite side" would just mean "good", and we'd be back to stars. Instead my leanings live here, as one shape. When a book's fingerprint lands close to it, its page says so. When a book is excellent and not my kind, the page says that too.
Not set yet.
Books like this one
When a book page says it reminds me of another, that's me saying so, with a reason. The site does compute which books have similar fingerprints and tags, but only to suggest candidates to me. Nothing computed is ever published as an answer.