If you've been around internet book spaces for a while, then you probably don't need me to relitigate all the problems with rating systems, and you can skip this paragraph, which just summarizes those problems: Some people like to grade books out of five or ten or a hundred. I prefer not to. A number cannot capture a reading experience. It's reductive, and while shorthands can be useful sometimes, quantitative measures of qualitative experiences are, in my opinion, incredibly distracting. A single number is so legible, so easy to understand, that people tend to look at the number and forget (or are too lazy) to pay attention to any of the more complicated and confusing things underneath. Context diappears. Nuance is stripped. Art can get flattened as a result, especially when the ratings get plugged into someone's algorithm somewhere that helps publishers determine what trends to start chasing. Ratings are also low-effort. Anyone can rate a book, even if they skimmed a book, even if they skipped half of it. I encourage myself to always think deeply about a book, but ratings make it so that I can choose not to. They make it so that I can say, "This book was a 4.5/5. If you have similar taste to me, you'll probably enjoy it." That kind of information might be helpful to some people, but I want to be more specific. I want to be able to articulate what a book is trying to do and what a book might be failing to do. For that reason, I don't rate books.
Much of our sense of meaning ... is peculiar, personal, and local. And metrics will always be deeply insensitive to such intimate, small-scale senses of meaning. Metrics are tuned to the needs of massive instituions.
C. Thi Nguyen, The Score
However, I also understand that shorthand is sometimes necessary. I used to annoy everyone by avoiding shorthand at all costs. It got to the point where I would refuse to say whether I liked a book or not -- because, to me, "like" versus "dislike" is reductive. I stand by that opinion, but also, sometimes people just want to know. Not to mention, at the end of the day, even a several-page review is a shorthand. It might be contributing something wonderful, but it's still trying to capture an experience in limited space. No review or essay or anything else can contain every single detail of a book, not without rewriting the entire book. And while I want to encourage people to read full reviews and reflections and essays and scholarly articles about literature, I also know that sometimes, you just want a quick and methodological way to judge whether a book is going to give you the experience that you're looking for.
So I came up with my own preferred shorthand for describing books. It's something that can be understood at a glance without turning qualitative information into quantitative information. My shorthand is called head/heart/hand/hook. I did not invent that phrase; I actually borrowed it from a paper I read on pedagogy, but I obviously use it a little differently. The way it works is as follows: I assign a book at least one emoji. There are only six emojis to choose from, and they are:
Some books can be assigned more than one emoji. Some books will only get one. What I hope is that this system engenders curiosity. When you see that a book offers an emotional experience, I hope you ask, "What kind of emotional experience? Is it a romance that makes readers swoon? A tragedy that makes readers cry? Both? Is it the kind of book that makes readers angry? Is it the kind of book that makes readers happy? Inspired? Nostalgic? Scared?" Likewise, when you see that book has excellent craft, I hope you ask, "How so? Is the prose lyrical? Experimental? Flowery? Pastiche? Did the author do something clever or creative or unique in terms of structure or setting?" And when you see that a book is 🐙/other, I hope you ask, "Why is this book so compelling without offering intellectual or emotional experiences, without hooking readers, and without having particularly notable craft? Is it subversive? Transgressive? Simply average in every way, but still somehow greater than the sum of its parts?" If my system works as intended, these questions will encourage you to engage more deeply with not only the book itself, but also with the discourse around it. (And I do think engaging deeply in discourse can lead to deeper engagement with the text.)
Just to be clear, I'm not going to sit here and claim any sort of moral superiority or whatever for refusing to assign numbers to books. There's no reason to belive that assigning emojis is inherently better than assigning numbers. However, for my personal purposes, my system has served me more effectively than a traditional rating system. You can, of course, completely ignore these silly little symbols, but if you're scrolling through my reviews, and you keep seeing these emojis, now you know that they actually mean something specific.