Tag: Book Club

How I rate books on Goodreads

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

I love reading books. Writing reviews on Goodreads makes me feel accomplished and helps me remember what I’ve read. Before Goodreads, I often forgot which books I owned and ended up buying them or even reading them again.

Most of my ratings are 4s and 5s. Some are 3s. Almost no ratings are 2s and 1s. One would expect a more normal distribution of ratings but I have a filtering system, and then a rating system, and they work well.

Filtering

  • I would not buy or start a book if it’s under 3.7 unless I knew the writer, 4+ would be preferred
  • I would not complete a book if it’s bad
  • I would not write a review if I didn’t complete it

This leaves most of the 1s and 2s books out.

Rating

  • For a book to be 5, it has to be a truly enjoyable piece. It can be educational, profound, fun, page-turner, interesting – one or two of these would be enough for a 5 by me. I tend to give 5s to most books thanks to the previous 3 rules. My Goodreads profile is full of 5s.
  • 4s are good books with serious flaws, often parts of a series or by writers who like to read. Here’s one that’s far too long for the events and could use editing but is otherwise okay, and is by a great writer:
  • For a book to get a 1 or a 2, it has to trick me that it’s better and punch me with a terrible ending that makes no sense. Here’s a flagged one for propaganda:

If you have a ranking system, I would appreciate a link to the blog post where it’s described or a comment here. Thanks!

Kajanga by Lubomir Nikolov

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment

5pm on a warm Sunday. I’m about to visit a book signing for a genre of books that almost ceased to exist in the late 90s. It’s in Lozenets, an expensive neighborhood located on a hill, in what looks like a residential building. There are no signs. I’m looking left and right. Am I at the right place? I see a door open and decide to get in. 10-15 meters after, there is another door that appears to be locked and a staircase leading downstairs to the right. I see bookshelves everywhere seemingly unattended. Perhaps I’m at the right place. Shall I keep going down to page 17? Or perhaps I should force the door (page 27)? In case I carry a little angry dog in my backpack, turn to 7.

This is the wiring style of gamebooks, and the new one is a 2nd edition of a rare book published in the 90s by Lubomir Nikolov, most copies of which have been lost or thrown away.

I kept walking down and found a large room, perhaps a bar, full of folks about my age. Why would anyone build such a large room 2-3 floors under a residential building?

I entered, got my book with an autograph, chatted with people, and it was fine.

The first game book published in Bulgaria was by the same author Lubomir Nikolov – Fire Desert. It started a genre and a community that inspired me to write and later to code. I’m not a very active member of this community but I buy the new books to support it and read some of them. If you want to try that but don’t speak Bulgarian, try Blood Sword.

One for the Money by Janet Evanovich

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

I like thrillers where a strong detective or military or whatever solves mysteries, catches murderers, and restores the balance of the force. Last week, I found the series about Stephanie Plum. She’s a headhunter, a field dominated by men on both sides. She fights with persistence, brains, and a bag full of stuff. Her first big target is an ex, and the chemistry is not gone just yet, to make things messier.

It is so refreshing to read about a strong female main character who is not superhuman. Silvia Azdreeva was one, and before her book, I read the main books from the Livia Lone series. Livia Lone was also fine but it felt like reading about Dexter Morgan with a female name. Stephanie Plum is far more interesting and fresh. No secret superpowers! I’d give a +1 star bonus on Goodreads just for that. She could happen with some imagination, perhaps more so than Silvia. All she needs to do is capture a bunch of criminals and send them to court without flying, laser eyes, or talking to the stars. How hard can that be?

5/5

The Temple of Gold by William Goldman

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments

I got to this book by pure randomness, using a random book finder. I had no clue it existed before the tool suggested it. My wish was to read something different and with more life in it. The last 2 books I finished were quite grim and had nearly identical serial killers. So here we are – by an act of luck, I got into this strange little world that was so wow.

The Temple of Gold has many beginnings, a little forgiveness, and fewer ends. It feels like a condensed version of the drama of an entire high school from the 1950s plus a spice of hopes, dreams, and aspirations. It is a mess of the kind that could happen and probably happens here and there, often in young people’s imagination or old people’s fears. The main character is not kind or even likable but despite that, the story is so well written and human that I went from start to finish in one try and enjoyed it.

Wikipedia says that when Goldman was in his early 20s, he got rejected by publishers for other work with “We can’t possibly publish this shit.” It’s quite an improvement to go from low-quality stories to world-class writing in less than 5 years. Overall, very happy with the randomizer, it could’ve suggested his prior work 😁

My next book will also not feature a serial killer.

How to climb K2 and Everest – Silvia Azdreeva’s journey

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment

I read “To Conquer Yourself” by Silvia Azdreeva yesterday. A woman who likes hiking goes to the Himalayas and climbs Ama Dablam, with no prior high-altitude experience. It’s 288 pages of captivating insanity and by far the best book I had a chance to read in 2024. Makes “Into thin air” sound sane or rookie, with its mild insanity levels, and lack of ambition or real achievement.

You can’t turn a page without thinking that this couldn’t possibly be happening, that it’s made up, that she’s going to give up, or even die. But the evidence is clear – it did happen, and a series of difficult adventures were endured by a woman made of steel, blood, tears, vomit, and a gigantic bowl of emotions. Reading it made me cry several times and then enthusiastically promote it to friends and family, although it looks like mountaineering is not exactly a hot topic out there.

The book is not yet available in English but it should be because it’s powerful and unusual. 5/5.