Top 5 Tuesday| 1/21/2020

I’ve only participated in Top 5 Tuesday once but I’ve been in such a reading slump, I haven’t finished any books so I don’t have anything to review. Top 5 Tuesday is a weekly discussion about a prompt from Shanah at the Bionic Book Worm. All you have to do is link back to one of her posts if you’d like to participate! This week’s prompt is ‘Top 5 Reasons I Rate a Book 5 Stars”.

1. Emotion

   I’ve said in a few reviews, if a book can make me cry, I’m more likely to rate it 5 stars. I know this isn’t fair because there are quite a few books that are funny or uplifting that shouldn’t make me cry, so I guess I’m going to clarify that really any book that causes me to have some deeper emotion will usually warrant a higher rating from me. This usually means I’m attached to the characters enough to care what happens to them and this doesn’t happen all that often, surprisingly enough.

2. Pacing

   I’m someone who loves a fast-paced read. If I don’t want to put the book down, I usually add a star to the rating just for that reason alone. However, not all books that I’ve enjoyed have been fast-paced. Sometimes it’s important to build the world and the characters and those happen to usually be slower points in a novel. I understand that so I definitely don’t knock off stars if there are slower-paced sections. That being said, I will knock off a star if the pacing is all over the place and doesn’t make sense.

3. Character Development

   Again, if an author can make me care about characters, I automatically want to give the book a high-rating. Usually, an author makes me care about the characters with some complicated character development. I think this can also go further if an author creates a complex, flawed character. I want to read about characters who make bad decisions and have to work through how to fix them. I want to eventually root for a character that I initially hated because of how flawed they are. Give me all of the flawed characters, I love not knowing whether or not I should root for someone.

4. World Building

   I love high-fantasy because I love reading all about a new world. With high fantasy, world-building can really make or break a story. If I can’t picture where I am in each scene, it’s harder for me to fall into the story. This is less likely to come into play with lighter contemporaries obviously but I guess if I’m reading something like that, I think it’s important for the setting to be well established.

5. A Deeper Theme/Topic

   A deeper theme for me doesn’t have to be something like Animal Farm but I think a perfect example of what I mean by this is in The Flatshare. It’s a light-hearted contemporary romance on the surface but while you read there are also deeper discussions on the criminal justice system. That deeper topic added to the story is purely why I bumped it up to one of my favorite reads of 2019.

Let me know why you rate books 5 stars! I’d love to see what I’m missing as it’s a goal of mine to read more critically going forward.