The Spice-O-Meter

It would be helpful if books had a rating system

I don’t actually advocate for an MPAA style universal rating system. What I really need is to come up with a solid system to use in my own book reviews which is easy for everyone to understand and for me to remember.

I enjoy reading all kinds of books. I find books a bunch of different ways—booktube, bookstagram, Goodreads, real life friends, browsing Kindle and Audible recommendations…Often, I can guess the level of content I’ll find from context clues. You know…the cover. Who or what recommended it, and what was recommended along with.

When roaming the dark recesses of Kindle Unlimited, the authors provide content warnings, tags, trigger warnings, the works—because everybody knows it’s a rabbit hole and we all only want the readers who will actually enjoy the content.

I’ve even encountered an Indie books rating system for steam ratings, in particular.

I can used the MPAA ratings to give readers ballparks on general content I think. Easy to remember. Everyone will have a basic idea of what it means. If I tell you a book is R for violence, you’ll have some idea what you’re getting into. And I’ll pair that information with a long explanation about how the non-violent parts are swoon-worthy and epic and hilarious and you can just skim the bits with entrails.

Everybody has their tastes, and I’d just like to be able to warn people, but also do it in a way that doesn’t pass judgement through word choice. You know…like calling a book dirty because it has explicit scenes. Or, conversely, clean, because it doesn’t. As if explicit content were the true measure of cleanliness. I’ve read books without sex in them that glorify truly horrifying relationships, and read explicit books that offer gentle primers on how to behave as adults in a serious relationship based on mutual respect and self-sacrifice.

I’ve been using a scale of 1-5 for spice, but I think I might need more numbers. After all, 1 can’t be nothing, because technically 0 is nothing (hat tip, Mr. & Mrs. Smith).

• 0 - Nothing. Not even on page kissing. Impressive, really.

• 1 - Kissing and/or references to sex.

• 2 - Make out, fade to black. Or more detailed or lots of references to sex.

• 3 - No fade to black but if you don’t already know how to have sex, you won’t learn the actual mechanics. But you might learn some good foreplay techniques.

• 4 - At least one explicit scene in which you could probably or definitely learn exactly how to make babies, or not make babies, as the case may be. Also, maybe some good foreplay techniques.

• 5 - Lots of explicit scenes.

Maybe a 5 scale is enough.

I feel like if I add more numbers I’ll definitely overthink it. More detail gets into trigger warnings, anyway, and you really need those listed separately.

My Zare Caspian stories are a 1 or 2 on the spice-o-meter. I anticipate there may come a book that rates a 3. It doesn’t fit the tone of the stories to do more, I don’t think.

I may also panic-employ scales as needed. A couple authors I like (T. Kingfisher and Margaret Rogerson, to name names) sometimes write things that edge on the horror genre. Well, T. Kingfisher openly writes horror. But I really enjoyed their other work and have read their creepier books anyway. T. Kingfisher is probably more of a 4 on the creep factor for me, but Rogerson—despite writing an entire story about fighting undead—is more of a 3. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I don’t remember anything being gooey. Yes, the concepts were scary, but the execution was tasteful, and the main point was the story and the general atmosphere.

I’ve been circling T. Kingfisher’s latest novel because it is definitely deeper into the creepy but I love her “hero and heroine go on adventure with amusing short sidekick” squads.

However, I do need to sleep at night. And so do you.

Oh…and I intend to talk about books here. Longer reviews than what I put on Goodreads.

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