𝓗𝓮𝓪𝓭 - 𝓗𝓮𝓪𝓻𝓽 - 𝓗𝓪𝓷𝓭 : 𝓪 𝓫𝓻𝓲𝓮𝓯 𝓷𝓸𝓽𝓮 𝓸𝓷 ( 𝓷𝓸𝓽 ) 𝓻𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓫𝓸𝓸𝓴𝓼

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, so I'll keep it brief. 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, which means people tend to look at the number and forget to pay attention to anything else. 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 you skimmed a book, even if you 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." 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.

However, I also understand that shorthand is sometimes necessary. I used to despise shorthand. I used to avoid it at all costs. It got to the point where I would refuse to say whether I liked a book or not -- because apparently "like" versus "dislike" is reductive. And it is reductive, 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'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. 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 five emojis to choose from, and they are:

1. 🧠 (head): This emoji is for books that gave me an intellectual experience.
2. 🧡 (heart): This is for books that gave me an emotional experience.
3. ✍️ (hand): This is for books whose craft (prose, structure, worldbuilding, etc.) I appreciated.
4. 🚫 (nothing) This is for books that I felt don't deserve any of the above emojis. It's basically for books that I didn't like at all. A book assigned this emoji doesn't get any other emojis.
5. 🪼 (other) This is for books that may not deserve any of the first three emojis, but there's still *something* about the book, something that can't be easily named, that makes it worthwhile. A book assigned this emoji (usually) doesn't get any other emojis.

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?" Certainly, the jellyfish emoji should make you start asking questions about what makes it good that can't be so easily named. And maybe 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 itself.)

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.