I’m always surprised when I see a book has been read by a few people and doesn’t have a star rating since I rate every book I complete. This has made me curious how often people rate what they’ve read.
And for good measure…
Giving a star rating automatically marks the book as finished (if it doesn’t have another status already) so it’s convenient to do so. I still do it for the other books (where I had to switch to “finished” anyway) for good measure, though.
I usually let stuff pile up in there, and when I feel like it just do everything in a single seating. I don’t know how that counts in your poll…
Sometimes when I’m not sure how I feel about a book I put off giving it a star rating, and then by the time I come back to it I’ve forgotten too many details about the book. Another common no-star scenario for me is when I read multiple books in a series, because the details between books sort of blur together in my head.
I rate everything because why not.
I try to grade everything but there are times where I am not sure and I skip. This mainly happens when I only read one volume out of a longer series and I don’t feel like I know the actual difficulty yet. But by that logic, if I don’t continue the series then I probably won’t ever grade it. I am curious to know if others base gradings off of volume 1 or a series as a whole?
I often don’t bother to rate a book with a bunch of ratings (not gradings) unless I disagree more than a star from its current rating, and then I’m probably going to write a review anyway.
Volume 1 only in most cases. If the difficulty substantially changes later on, I will come back and edit my gradings (the better approach would be to ask the admins to split the gradings, which is an option they have on the backend, but making a report, etc, is too annoying on my end)
I will delay rating if 1) the book is still being read by a book club (I’ll usually wait till the end) 2) I’m unsure how I feel about the book and need to let it sit for a while.
I try to not only rate but also review as much as I can, because I know the feeling of frustration when a book I’m looking up has been read by multiple people but no one has expressed any kind of opinion on it. It’s what made me suggest having a Q&A section on book pages.
I’ll delay grading when I’m unsure about the relative difficulty of the book I finished. This mostly happens with audiobooks, because it’s hard to tell whether the difficulty was due to the voice acting or grammar/vocabulary, and kanji in particular play no role at all, so it’s hard to compare. I’ll skip grading between manga and novels or when I’m completely unsure because of time or completely different kinds of difficulty.
Ratings
If a book has a lot of ratings and reviews, I sometimes only rate it if I have strong feelings about it.
If a book has very few or no ratings or reviews, I try to write a review. I don’t think the star ratings are really useful, because they only really mean something to me personally if they come from someone whose taste I feel is similar to mine. So just rating without reviewing feels a bit meaningless to me, so I usually just write a review. If I don’t find the time to review, I often don’t rate at all because I forget.
Gradings
I hate grading because I am really bad at it. I read in a lot of different ways (intensive, extensive, digital, physical, different dictionaries) and I find it very difficult to compare different books just because of the different methods used 
I still grade and accept that it is imperfect, but I loathe it a bit to be honest 
and I skip a lot of things.
I wish we could see a random snippet of text from each book side by side when we grade, but of course that’s not really possible because of copyright, I suppose, but it would help me! And it would also make grading an exercise in comprehensible input, haha.
Sometimes I don’t know what to rate something or it doesn’t feel right to rate something, so I don’t give it a star rating. This probably happens more with non-Japanese books, though.
I almost always grade in terms of difficulty (unless I really cannot figure out if the book is harder than another one). On the other hand, I hate rating, as it feels incredibly subjective to me and I also tend to not decide on books based on that, so I rarely do it tbh.
I always grade because to me it’s one of the main points of the site, and I always rate unless it’s a series in which case I may only rate the first volume and let that stand for the series. Some books I don’t want to rate (giving a star rating to some nonfiction books dealing with sensitive topics felt very weird) but I can’t leave a review without a star rating so I did it anyways.
I generally rate books unless I simply forget to do so, because I have a personal rating scheme that I don’t have trouble slotting books into:
I sometimes grade, but mostly only if I’m feeling enthusiastic and the book has no grading already. This is largely because natively has a habit of asking me to grade against books I read five or ten years ago and can barely remember beyond “this author tends to be not too difficult to read”. Plus the one-vs-one grading approach I find awkward, as I feel like I’m being inconsistent across comparisons (I bet there are books where I’ve rated A is harder than B is harder than C is harder than A…)
I’m fairly certain I’ve graded books like this multiple times
Yep, I always rate and score. Gives me that extra blip of accomplishment when I officially mark it as Finished. 
Normally I’ll do it right after finishing, but there are occasions where I need to sit and ponder the book a bit, or even go back and modify my original star rating.
Like others, I’ve more and more run into issues grading books as I’ve read more. The lines between them get blurrier, and I’m afraid my grading gets less accurate as time passes for that low-L30 range, since there’s not usually anything that stands out to me that would indicate something being easier/harder.
Thanks for the votes and comments everyone!
For me, I primarily rate for myself, not others, which is why I rate every book. I want to be able to look back at stuff I read years ago and may not remember the details of and still have some idea of how I liked it. (Obviously I’ll remember some of that for my favorites, but I won’t as much for many 3-4 star books.) Also, I do read a lot of obscure manga, so in those cases I like that my ratings can give some idea of how it is to others, if they trust my judgment.
Grading is definitely less straightforward for the reasons some others have mentioned. It just becomes harder and harder to make comparisons with the passage of time and change in my abilities. I still do it almost all the time, especially for manga that have no gradings to get rid of those annoying ?? in the difficulty level. I just make liberal use of the “never grade this book” feature to block comparisons with books I read a long time ago and don’t remember.
This is so fun to read everyone’s thoughts, it’s given me some good food for thought with my ratings and gradings.
For me, starring a book - I use something like pm215’s system. If there is no review I always write one since I appreciate those a lot.
I grade after volume 1 otherwise I would forget as others say, but as I read other things (in the future), then I can compare them to multiple volumes, if I’ve read multiple volumes by then. So I figure it works itself out in the end
totally how I feel about it when the style is way different. I just try to imagine, would me at stage of x book be able to read y book? And then if I can’t decide I just mark that they are similar. Especially for manga vs prose it feels nonsensical, but on the other hand, I appreciate all the gradings that are there, so I just go for it and hope it all averages out if enough people do it.
If I read a book long enough ago that I just forgot about it, I’ll skip it if it doesn’t feel obvious.
definitely! I go straight there, it’s like a reward somehow.
I see this as well. For Japanese, where I’m a beginner, there is a huge contrast for me in book difficulty, it’s mostly obvious what is harder or easier.
In German where I’m fluent, then it’s really really hard to rate difficulty because I don’t feel an obvious difference in reading them if they aren’t miles apart. Sometimes I wonder if I should perhaps not rate German books. On the other hand, since it’s in beta and I don’t think anyone will read some of the ridiculous books I’ve added and read, I just go with it.
I always grade because the more gradings we have the more accurate they’ll be, I believe in the hive mind. And also, because I hate this exclamation mark that tells me there unfinished business (it really irks me).
I also try to always give star ratings (only the first volume though).
I try to review but I’m not really good at expressing or summarizing my thoughts.
I give star ratings to all volumes of a series, simply because I do not like them all the same.
Maybe an interesting question. How do you rate if you think it’s in-between, like you’d want to give 3.5 stars?
I only give 5 stars if it’s really 5 stars. So 4.5 rounds down, but otherwise I tend to round up.
