I recently noticed a thing called “ReaderRank” while browsing Booksirens for ARCs, and after connecting it to goodreads was amused to find my reviewing being…reviewed.
According to it, I am a ‘lenient’ reviewer because my average review is 4 stars. This is in part because I’m very picky about the books I read: I check out reviews and read samples before committing. I also only rank books I’ve read, unlike many of the trolls on goodreads and amazon who one-star books they’ve never read because they don’t like the book’s author/perspective/etc, and do the reverse for those they favor.
This is a little fun. I constantly get notifications from Google about Riding Rockets, which if I read today I would probably be a little kinder to given that I’ve ‘met’ Mullane in various astronaut memoirs and now appreciate him as more than the hormone-addled jock he comes off as in the book. I barely remember The Astral, and had to check out my review of it to remind myself of the story. I knew a hotel was involved and that was about it. The Tehran Initiative is presumably ‘overrated’ because the people reading it agreed with its warhawk stance re: Iran, not to mention the Left Behind-esque religious nature.
Now this I don’t understand at all: there are few people who can rival my nonfiction variety, something I say with as much humility as I can muster. Admittedly, my fiction reading is very siloed into historical and science fiction, so perhaps that combined with very generic nonfiction categorization is causing this weird summation.
Evidently I’ve read a book as short as 32 pages (has to be one of Amazon’s Warmer or Forward story collections), a book over a thousand pages (Will Durant or Brothers Karamazov), and prefer reading books in the late ’90s, 2000s, and early 2010s. Not a surprise, there: those would be most of the years I’ve been a living reader! Considering that I typically buy books used if I can find them in a library, there’s obviously a skew toward older books I can find cheap.
If you use ReaderRank, does it strike you as accurate?
Reading Freely 
haha yeah these reader ranks are interesting but I take them with a grain of salt. I think your assessment of your “smaller spread” to be accurate because I very much doubt Book Sirens separates nonfic into subject categories. For me it says I’m stricter compared to other readers which is funny to me because I don’t really feel that strict 😂
I actually owe your page to getting me to explore BookSirens — I noticed the sidebar, clicked to see what to see what it was, and now I’ve been shopping ARCs! I used to do NetGalley but I forgot to submit some reviews and I’ve been too ashamed to go back…
Oh I know that feeling! I forgot to download an ARC from Netgalley because it archived SO EARLY but luckily BookSirens came to the rescue as it was on there too 👍 I am glad that my sidebar could be just a little helpful 🙂
I’m going to read my first one for them this weekend — a novelization of Plan 9 from Outer Space, of all things.
I hope you enjoy it and wow that is so specific but I love that! Can’t say I’ve ever seen it!
It’s one of those “so bad it’s good” kind of movies: I saw it on YouTube and later watched “Ed Woods”, which is about the director. He’s played by Johnny Depp. The movie is saturated with amateurism and awfulness — visible wires for the UFO, terrible writing and worse delivery. A few years ago I read a book called Before Plan 9, a collection of short stories detailing the other plans. It’s fun, campy SF.
haha I do sometimes enjoy those so bad they’re good type of movies. Sounds ridiculous! If I ever come across it I’ll give it a try! I’ve watched some Neil Breen movies so I imagine it can’t be worse than those! LOL
I just took a look at mine… seems relatively accurate. But I’ve never asked for ARCs from them… hm…
I get three or four appeals to have me review books every day, and I think it is because of BookSirens. I accept almost no books for review anymore, but I have read and reviewed many, many books—so it looks like I am a good prospect. I should probably take down my info there!
Possibly!
Dang. Do people actually do this???? Thank god I have not encountered any of these trolls… yet.