I’ve been tracking the books on my reading list for a handful of years now. This serves as a guide for others looking for their next book and as a way to keep my own thoughts organized and available to retrieve at a later date. In addition to giving a few sentences about each one, I also give them my personal rating. There are a number of ways I’ve seen to rate books so I decided to catalogue a few of them below. Method 1 is what I currently use but the other two have sparked my interest since I discovered them.

So here’s my question to you: which of these book rating systems do you think is the most valuable? Which would best help you to decide future books to read for yourself?

Method 1

Standard 5 star system. 5 stars is a book you absolutely MUST read, 3 is an average read, and 1 is definitely a book not worth the pages it’s printed on. This is what I currently use here.

Method 2

“An old author whose pen name was Cladius Clear said that a reader could divide his books as he would people. A few were ‘lovers,’ and those books would go with him into exile. Others are ‘friends.’ Most books are ‘acquaintances,’ works with which he was on nodding terms.”

source: Spiritual Leadership

Method 3

“The best guide I know to readerly judgment is our old friend Auden, who graciously summed up a lifetime of thinking about these matters in a single incisive sentence: “For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don’t like it; I can see this is good, and, though at present I don’t like it, I believe with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don’t like it.”

source: The Pleasures of Reading in An Age of Distraction

So which is the best in your opinion? Better yet, have you found anything better?