I know a lot of bloggers don't like to use ratings.
I know a lot of bloggers do like to use ratings.
I - I fall somewhere in the middle.
I rate books most of the time. If I'm iffy on a book, I don't give it a rating. To me, it's a simple as that. Sure, you can't compare a paranormal book the same way that you would compare a contemporary book - but I'm not rating them on the same scale like that. I rate books based on how much I like them or enjoy them.
I do the same thing to movies. For as long as I can remember, at the end of watching a movie, my mom would turn to me and ask me to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10. (It's how I got the rating system for WORD.) It wasn't necessarily on how good the movie was - though that, of course, always plays a factor - but on how much I enjoyed it.
That's how I rate books. Sure, some books are much better written than others. Some are just fluff. But a superbly well written book with excellent plot and characters may rate less than a fluffy piece that I was in the perfect mood for and that I got sucked into. (I mean, clearly I won't give a bad book a high rating, but still.) It's all about how much I like it. I'll admit, Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk is bloody brilliant, but I'd only give it a 6 on my scale, simply because it's not something I would actively go reread. Meanwhile, Angus, Thongs, And Full Frontal Snogging will get a ten every time. You can't not laugh during that book.
And it's not as if I'm not voicing whether or not I think it's well developed or badly written or whatever; there are paragraphs before the actual rating, and I do give comments with said rating about the book. The rating, for me, is just an easier way to figure out what books I might want to buy or recommend to somebody. It makes things simpler.
What about YOU, hmm? Do you rate books?