Insights from linearisation
Oct. 18th, 2005 12:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fivemackI 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
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beamjockey
Date: 2005-10-17 11:49 pm (UTC)Wouldn't one expect scores to be fairly high, if the quality of one's snap judgement were good? You wouldn't bother to read a book at all unless you had reason to expect it to reward the effort. So you make decisions in selecting which books to read. Maybe you're pretty good at weeding out bad books before you read them.
Unless I didn't understand your point.
Re: beamjockey
Date: 2005-10-18 02:12 am (UTC)