In the first three months of the year (AKA the first quarter or Q1), I read 24 books. The vast majority of these were in the three star range (14 of these, or 58%) and 75% total were rated under three stars. I'm happy, thus far, with the number of books that I've read (with February being my best month at 12 books). However, I wish I had more than 3 five-star ratings, with two of those being in one series and the last being cheating out of the ordinary rules. Now, it should be said, that in ranking these books I started by dividing them by what I ranked them-- Class A with 5-stars; Class B with 4-stars; Class C with 3-stars; etc.-- and then ranked them within each of these classes. In order to put together these classes, however I rounded down my rating out of 5-stars. That is, if I originally gave a book 3.75 stars out of 5, then it became a part of the 3-stars, or class 3.
The only exception being my top-read of the quarter, in which I felt so strongly about being my favorite that I had to pull it up from the 4.75 ranking that I gave. This book is one that I can't give 5-stars because it wasn't perfect for what it was. This book is one of the few that I've read as a literary book, and not just a fun lil guy. It wasn't a good time to read (as you'll understand when you see what it is), but it was narratively magnificent with beautiful prose. It's just incredibly difficult to form an emotional attachment to-- which is usually what I use as a marker of a 5-star-- but that's how the character was intended to be written. That being said, I do have an intense intellectual attachment to.
Thus, I have created a ranking of all the books I read in Q1. Since I've discusses all of these in my monthly reviews (Jan, Feb, March), I don't want to go in depth in any of these all over again, so I just want to format this as a list.
Class A:
2. Omens - Kelly Armstrong
3. Visions - Kelly Armstrong
Class B:
5. Dear Aaron - Mariana Zapata
6. Scarred - Emily McIntire
Class C:
8. Betrayals - Kelly Armstrong
9. Forever Never - Lucy Score
10. Rituals - Kelly Armstrong
12. Stock Market 101 - Michele Cagan
13. Personal MBA - Josh Kaufman
14. The Substitution - Morgan Elizabeth
15. Consumed - David Cronenberg
16. Portrait of a Scotsman - Evie Dunmore
17. Hot Vampire Next Door - Nikki St. Crowe
18. Before and Laughter - Jimmy Carr
19. The Gunslinger - Stephen King
20. Heartless Sky - Caroline Peckham
11. Beneath - Kristi Demeester
Class D:
22. Haunting Adeline - H. D. Carlton
23. The People in the Trees - Hanya Yanagihara
Class E:
21. Villette - Charlotte BrontΓ«
24. Savage Wilder - Veronica Eden
I think that I'll aim to do a quarterly ranking for the first three, but instead of doing a quarter 4. I'll put together a year review, or year-end ranking, utilizing these lists. I think this also says a lot of how I rank things-- like it's very difficult to get a 1-star rating from me, even if I hated the book. The key example of that is Yanagihara's The People in the Trees, where I hated 99% of the book, but it had an interesting enough premise for me to want to read and the ending was fine enough, so it got a 2-stars.
I also found it kind of hard to rank in my non-fiction reads with my fiction, since I rank them on such different scales. However, the use of classifying the books helped a lot, because after that it was just I liked A more than B so A goes here and B goes here.
For Q2, I'd like to try and read more books that I really like-- I'm kind of aiming to have 4 or 5 5-star reads. In aiming for that, I'm going to try to focus less on books that I see all the time on social media as perfect books and spend more time on books that I want to read. My goal for the year is to read at least 5 non-fiction books, and technically I've already read 3, but I'm only counting 2, since Carr's Before and Laughter didn't really teach my anything, I guess, so I'm not counting it. It was just too different from my other non-fiction books.
For the next quarter, in terms of fiction, I'm going to try and read more horror and mystery/thriller.
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