Making the Grade (originally posted on October 25, 2011)

With 350 reviews (and counting), I suppose it’s a bit late in the game for an explanation of how I review books, but here goes anyway. If you have no interest in such things, you can jump ship now…

To use two recent reviews as an example: I gave Reamde, a work of fiction by Neal Stepehnson, an A. To Innocent Blood, a non-fiction book by John Ensor dealing with the topic of abortion, I gave a B+. Clearly—and I hope this does not come as a surprise to anyone reading this—the value of human life far outweighs the imaginary exploits of fictitious people.

So how do I assign those grades? Simply put, I rate books based on what they aim to be. While I don’t know exactly what an author intends to achieve with a book, I’m usually able to get a feel for the gist of it from what I read. So, to use our earlier examples, I know that Stephenson is trying to write an entertaining, well-developed story that may or may not happen to make some allusions to reality. The events within the book take place in a variety of countries and many of the characters use weapons, but no one would think it was meant to be used as a textbook for a geography class or a manual at the firing range.

Similarly, Ensor’s book on abortion is meant to unmask the apathy surrounding this horrific nightmare and spur his readers to take definitive, immediate action to defend the inherent value of human life. He is not trying to provide an amusing escape from reality but rather a cold-water-in-the-face shock to the reality already going on around us. If someone were to read his book and react by laughing hysterically to the point of delirium, or to hurriedly concoct a plot to bomb an abortion clinic, it would be safe to say they completely missed the point.

That said, when I give a book a grade, I consider what that book is trying to be. That leads to questions concerning to what degree the author accomplished that goal: Was the main point expressed and argued cogently? Were deliberate connections made between the force of their thesis and any action they desired me to take? Or, did the characters of the story resonate on any meaningful level? Did they act in ways that seemed consistent with how they were portrayed? (As a side note, Tony Reinke’s book Lit!–which I just reviewed—is a great new resource that highlights the ways and methods involved in such questioning of the text.)

The idea behind this is that each book is graded against itself. One book on parenting, for instance, may be more thorough in scope than another one, but both can be equally well-executed. To that point: Thomas Case’s When Christians Suffer and John Piper’s Spectacular Sins and D. A. Carson’s How Long, O Lord? all deal with the same general topic of suffering in different ways (and at different lengths and reading levels) but all do so admirably well. So each book can be graded highly on its own merits without being compared to one another.

Although I will admit that there have been times when I have graded a book higher for the topic it addressed or its main themes rather than on its actual execution of those topics/themes, I am efforting to avoid such mistakes these days.

One last point: I mostly give high grades because I mostly read what appeals to me to begin with. I am not a professional book reviewer in that I don’t receive free copies for review. Books I read and review are typically ones I have bought, and if I’m going to spend money on a volume, I generally need to have some desire to actually read it and at least the slim anticipation of enjoying it.