Personally: The Pendragon series of YA novels. I poured my spending money into that series and even skipped school of the day Soldiers of Halla was released. My English teacher at the time was also really plugged in to YA literature at the time, so she knew exactly why I wasn’t in school and the first thing she asked me the next day was for my thoughts on the book.

I don’t count them as completed because I didn’t complete them. Yes, I track books I DNF but I am honest about not having finished them. They don’t count towards my yearly reading goals and they don’t count towards any of my stats besides the DNF tracker. Saying “I feel like if you actively decide not to finish you’ve already completed it in some way” is just lying to yourself and anyone who might care.

The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace as a teen. The former I found so profound as a kid, but now I think it’s a nice little tonal piece of writing but that’s about it. The latter I didn’t get then and I am not going to try to get now. I like DFW as an essayist, but Infinite Jest is too much of him for far far too long.

I don’t finish books that I’d rate a 2, so a 0 would be a book so abhorrent I wouldn’t even start it. So Atlas Shrugged gets a 0/5 by me.

NK Jemison

Fifth Season is so beloved and I can see why, but something about her writing just doesn’t click with me.

People will classify anything without explicit sex scenes as YA.

People will classify anything without explicit sex scenes as YA.

I’m unlikely to finish a book that I would rate a 1 or 2, so that whole portion of the scale is bad and worse.

3 is a good book with some major issues or an okay book with some parts or ideas that I liked a lot.

4 is a generally good book or a great book with major issues.

5 is a great book or a book so great that it overcomes my major issues.

Edge cases get nudged with a +/-0.5. Any more granular than a half point scale feels increasingly arbitrary to me.