Membrebrowner56

Real Name

Keith C. Brown

About My Library

I really like seeing the various approaches that people take to cataloging their LT libraries. Some appear to post every book they either own or have come in contact with over the years while others seem to adopt a more parsimonious approach of only recording the books they have read and can remember well enough to rate. I fall into the second category, meaning that I have read and rated everything in my list.

Based on a very casual survey of other LT members, my rating system seems to be pretty typical. I have adopted the following standards:

5.0 stars: A perfect or near-perfect book; there might not be too many of these in one’s life
4.0-4.5 stars: Above average, possibly bordering on brilliant; a very satisfying reading experience
3.0-3.5 stars: A good, solid book; neither above nor below prior expectations
2.0-2.5 stars: Below to well-below average; critically flawed in some fundamental way
0.5-1.5 stars: An unfortunate waste of everyone’s time

I guess it is the teacher in me, but I try to keep my overall average rating in the range of 3.5-3.7, which translates into a mean of around 70-75 percent (i.e., the “classic” average test score, at least for some of the courses I teach).

One challenge has been to apply the same rating scale to books from wildly diverse genres. For instance, I assigned a 4.0-star rating to both Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Clearly, there is really no comparison between these two authors, but those particular books affected me in a similar way, albeit for very different reasons. I’m not sure that this is the right way to go about it, but I can’t think of another way that doesn’t involve making arbitrary judgments about the relative merits of fiction versus non-fiction works.

Ubicació

Austin, Texas

Memberships

LibraryThing Early Reviewers

Autors preferits

Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, Paul Auster, Roberto Bolaño, Italo Calvino, Andrea Camilleri, Robertson Davies, Don DeLillo, William Faulkner, Richard Ford, Malcolm Gladwell, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Kazuo Ishiguro, Denis Johnson, Donna Leon, Michael Lewis, Gabriel García Márquez, James McBride, Colum McCann, Cormac McCarthy, David Mitchell, Haruki Murakami, Vladimir Nabokov, Pablo Neruda, Michael Ondaatje, Per Petterson, Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon, Ayn Rand, Marilynne Robinson, Salman Rushdie, Richard Russo, George Saunders, Elizabeth Strout, Luis Alberto Urrea, Jesmyn Ward

Preferits locals

Llibreries: Atticus Book Store, Book People, Book Trader Cafe, City Lights Books, Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeehouse, Crescent City Books, Daunt Books - Marylebone, El Ateneo - Grand Splendid, Foyles, Half Price Books - North Lamar, Harvard Book Store, Henry Pordes Books, London Review Bookshop, Powell's City of Books (Portland), Strand Bookstore, The Hermitage Bookshop, Treehorn Books, Verbatim Books, Warwick's, Waterstones Covent Garden, Weller Book Works, Wonder Book Frederick

Biblioteques: University of Texas Libraries - Harry Ransom Center

Member Connections

Amics

66usma, Catreona, nivramkoorb, NoPlanetB

Biblioteca interessant

alalba, alphaorder, Castlelass, Cecrow, Hagelstein, larryt78748, Misprint