The Engagement Rating of Novels

I think the novels I read can be placed into one of the following four categories:

1. You end up skim reading it i.e it's not at all engaging. It's a chore to read, but you want to see what happens in the end (most likely this will happen near the end, if it happens the first half of the book, I'd just give up on it).

2. I don't skim read, but it's not engaging and a bit of a chore to read and finish.

3. Yeah . .it's ok . .ish.

4. You actually look forward to picking it up again and reading some more i.e it's a "page turner". "4" is very rare with me. When I was a kid, yes, lots of "page turners" back then.

Same for films. 4 is rare.  And I have watched less less famous films than anyone else.  So I've watch none of the star war, Harry Potter, lord of the rings, batman, Godfather films etc. 

How much I like novels compared to other people.

Ever since the beginning of 2011 I've been giving a rating out of 100 for each novel I've read. I also thought it would be interesting to take the average Goodreads rating out of 5, convert it to a score out of 100 and compare this Goodreads rating to my own ratings. Here is the chart:

The blue dots represent each novel, a total of 323 novels. The x axis is my rating, the y axis is the average Goodreads rating. Hence, on the far left, my lowest rated novel I gave 6 out of 100, and if you read off the Goodreads value, it is 67 out of 100. Note also that the y axis starts at 50. That's because no Goodread average rating was less than 50.

The red dotted line is a trend line. It slightly slopes upward from left to right. This means that there is a positive correlation between how much I enjoy a novel on average, and how much the average person enjoys it. However, it appears to be a weak correlation. Indeed, the worst novel that I rated at 6, and my best novel rated at 89, have the very same Goodreads rating of 67! This suggests I really shouldn't take much notice of average customer readings at all.

My average rating is 57, but the average Goodreads rating is 80 (4 stars)! This means that Goodreads (and indeed Amazon) ratings are grossly inflated and therefore unreliable. I mean naively one might suppose that score of 80 or 4 stars means a novel is pretty good. But that is merely an average rating. To be in the top quarter of all novels a Goodreads rating needs to be 84/100 or 4.2 stars. So a big difference from 80 or 4 stars (better than half of all books), to 84 or 4.2 stars (better than three-quarters of all books).  This from the xkcd webcomic is appropriate.

As a matter of further interest, my average rating for male novelists is 58 and for females it is 55.  For the average Goodreads reader the figures are identical at 80.

Alerts for when new books are published

I was hoping I could find somewhere on the net where I can enter authors names and get an email alert when a new book by them is published. Can't find anywhere apart from "following" each of the authors on Amazon. But I was a bit leery of doing that fearing Amazon will inundate me with emails rather than just informing me when a new book comes out. But 2 days ago I did it anyway. My fears were justified. Just got an email alert for a new book by this author, but it was released 2 months ago in May! (and I knew about it already having just followed him 2 days ago). Why is it so impossible to get email alerts for just new books?

Update: 15 minutes later.  And now I've just received an alert for a book that isn't being released until October! Grrr . .bollox to this. I'd best unfollow them all. I knew this would happen!

Class of 92

Just started reading this:

Class of 92 by Jason Ayres

A guy from the 2050's goes back in time to 1992.  He goes into a pub and it is £1.30 for a pint of "old peculiar".  (As an aside, Old Peculiar is vile!  I remember drinking a pint of it around 30 years ago -- never again.  Not as bad as wine though. There's only one drink worse than wine, and that's non-alcoholic wine.).  Anyway, at "Our Price" (does this shop still exist?  I guess not) chart CD's were being advertised at "just" £9.99 each.  CDs seven times the price of a pint? Guess the author has got these facts right.  People trying to make a profit knowing that people are replacing their vinyls! 

He says (or the time traveller says) there's no Internet in 1992? Pretty sure I referenced the Internet in this essay on the philosophy of science around that time. I paid someone to type it for me, and she put "Internat" by mistake, so I guess she hadn't heard of it though.

Deciding on a novel to read

I've decided to avoid reading all 5 star customer reviews on amazon -- they can't be trusted since 66% of all reviews on Amazon are 5 star. OK, looking for a novel to read. I read the blurb, sounds great, but then read the customer reviews and keep getting put off!

Reading novels when I was a child.

It's peculiar, but as an adult I very rarely can be bothered to read a novel again. As a child I used to read the same books over and over and over again, especially Enid Blyton books. Maybe once a year I would read all the famous Five, all the 8 adventure books, the 15 Fatty books etc. And the Narnia and Jennings books over and over again.

I think I perhaps just enjoyed reading children's books vastly more. They were about characters I cared about, which I could visit again in the next book in the series etc.

As an adult there's only a handful I've read a second time. Shogun . . umm . .and I'm struggling to think of anything else.