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Insights from linearisation
Oct. 18th, 2005 12:04 amI keep a record -- at least, a list and a set of one-line reviews, and something which tries to be a score on a scale of zero to fifty -- of the books I read.
Today I sorted by score the books I'd rated in the last eight months.
Only 20% scored less than 25
45% scores in the thirties
50% scored 36 or above.
20% scored above 42.
This says, I think, that I've a lamentable inability to recognise bad books, and that science fiction has a wide midlist in terms of quality; the books in the thirties are almost all SF, most non-fiction or non-genre fiction clusters at one or the other end of the list.
bottom: The Rakehells of Heaven, which read as a wry satire on some kind of situation that no longer existed.
20% mark: Spin State, a detective novel set around the premise that a miner's life, even in space, is nasty, brutish and short.
40%: Sky Coyote, fluffy caper-novel of time-travel derring-do set among an extinct Indian tribe.
60%: The Pirates of Rosinante, a novel of Reagan-era Californian-aerospace-industry space-based optimism.
80%: The Wooden Sea, somewhere around the edge of magic realism; either time-travelling aliens or a descent into madness.
Top: An Equal Music; Vikram Seth writing about a string quartet, about the only novel about humans on contemporary Earth to have kept me reading all night
Today I sorted by score the books I'd rated in the last eight months.
Only 20% scored less than 25
45% scores in the thirties
50% scored 36 or above.
20% scored above 42.
This says, I think, that I've a lamentable inability to recognise bad books, and that science fiction has a wide midlist in terms of quality; the books in the thirties are almost all SF, most non-fiction or non-genre fiction clusters at one or the other end of the list.
bottom: The Rakehells of Heaven, which read as a wry satire on some kind of situation that no longer existed.
20% mark: Spin State, a detective novel set around the premise that a miner's life, even in space, is nasty, brutish and short.
40%: Sky Coyote, fluffy caper-novel of time-travel derring-do set among an extinct Indian tribe.
60%: The Pirates of Rosinante, a novel of Reagan-era Californian-aerospace-industry space-based optimism.
80%: The Wooden Sea, somewhere around the edge of magic realism; either time-travelling aliens or a descent into madness.
Top: An Equal Music; Vikram Seth writing about a string quartet, about the only novel about humans on contemporary Earth to have kept me reading all night
