Putting a rating on a book is hard! Reviewers all come up with their own methods of doing this and I have tried many over the years. After some experimentation, I have finally decided to settle on this one. The Books on Autism Shelving Rating with lots of colourful infinity loops.
The Shelving Rating
I like colours and I like tying together themes and images already used elsewhere in the blog. So this was where this idea came from. What do these ratings mean? Well, there’s flexibility in the shelving but the general idea is below.
Top Shelf
Top shelf books are books I really enjoyed reading. So I made them sparkly. These are the books which I (generally speaking) highly recommend.
Gold is reserved for absolute favourite reads.
Middle Shelf
These books are ones which were above average to varying degrees.
The Bright Rainbow (on the left) is for solid reads that I liked but which didn’t quite hit the top shelf for me. Still good reads.
The Fading Rainbow (on the right) is for books which I felt had a reasonable amount of good content but which went off track or contained some parts which were a bit squiffy. For example, this might be some sections of misinformation amongst otherwise good content in a non-fiction, or some disappointing or stereotypical (but not outright awful) autistic rep in a fiction book that has a good storyline.
Bottom Shelf
The bottom shelf is books I personally would not recommend.
The Blue Infinity (on the left) is for books which I thought had considerable issues and/or which I did not enjoy. They may also be poorly edited, and have little in the way of structure or order. For example, non-fiction books may have a considerable amount of poor information or be limited in the useful information it provides. It may be out-dated or contain disproven or highly suspect research. For fiction books this rating might be given for poor autistic representation or storyline I just did not like at all.
The Cracked Blue Infinity (on the right) is for books which I think would be better off used as recycling. These books contain harmful or outright abusive practice (in non-fiction books) or such terrible autistic/disabled representation and storyline (in fiction books) that I would never recommend anyone reads it.
Books on Autism 