I think I told you before that if you were to read a year’s worth of books and rate them all on a 1-to-5-star scale you’d find a shitload of three-star books. You would probably never run across a one-star book (no one sucks at picking that bad) and, according to my personal calculations, you’ll only encounter a five-star book, the Holy Grail of every bookworm, about nine percent of the time.
Anna never did marry. Never got around to it she’d say. But she had hundreds of kids over the years and countless intimate relationships that played out in beautiful, unexpected and deeply personal ways in places far, far away … right next door.
As I approach my 500th book review on Goodreads it strikes me how rare a “five-star” book really is. Goodreads.com is a nice place to find a new book and I especially like it because it allows me to create a digital archive, an online library of all the books I’ve read. This site lets you rate books on a scale of one-to-five stars. If a book only rates one or two stars then it’s crap and, well, it means you’re shitty at picking out books. I’ve never rated a book as “one star,” but, alas, I’ve stumbled and had to endure a couple of “two stars.” It turns out that most of the books I read, in the final evaluation, rate three or four stars. A “three-star” book, in my estimation, is a solid read but just not as compelling as I’d hope; a “four-star” book is a damn fine book just short of greatness.