William T Goodall wrote:
>
> Just to make things even more exciting I have calculated this table
> using a simple trimmed mean where a single 'best' and a single 'worst'
> rating are excluded and the remainder averaged. Since I'm throwing away
> two scores for each book each book has to be rated a minimum of five
> times rather than three.
>
> There are now 1416 book ratings by 23 users. If you forgot where it
> was:-
>
> http://books.scattersoft.com
>
> So this is the SF top ten...
>
> Hyperion, Dan Simmons 1
...
I never read this one, so I resisted the temptation to rate it
"useless". I did rate the C.S. Lewis books, _Perlandra_ etc,
as "useless". Mentioning other planets does not make an
allegory into science fiction. (Similarly for _Animal Farm_.)
It's a good site, but I do have some criticisms that I can't
seem to repress. The voting process is not at all intuitive,
where one has to select the votes to change (from "none"), go
to another screen, enter the numbers with drop-down menues,
and then confirm the votes. Why not just have a drop-down menu
for each book, with an additional option "not voted on"
preselected?
The selection of books seems to be very haphazard. I sort of
admired the humor in Harry Harrison's _Stainless Steel Rat_
series. But I couldn't remember which ones I had read, and so
just voted for the first one as a proxy for the series. And in
a similar vein, why was Keith Laumer's _Retief_ series omitted?
These two could be partially remedied by giving most authors
an "other books" entry. Then if I wanted to vote for Michael
Swanwick's _The Iron Dragon's Daughter_, I could approximate
my true feelings by voting for it as an "other book". As is,
I had not read the two books of his that were listed, and simply
did not vote on him at all. (Not that this would have helped
me vote for Jeff Noon's _Vurt_, since none of his books are
listed...)
---David
<end Rant>
_______________________________________________
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
