The variable weight of stars

I’ve written before about wanting to reduce my personal library to something rather more manageable in size, with a higher concentration of books I really like.  As much as I love the idea of having a house full of books, it's an idea that loses much of its appeal if they're books I'm probably never going to read again.  And I must admit I’d rather read a favorite book ten times than read five books of marginal interest twice each.

Of course the problem with this is deciding which books to get rid of.  The past few days I’ve been tempted to begin a massive reorganization (and culling) of my books, but most of the ones I’ve already read I’ve sufficiently forgotten that I would need to read them again in order to decide if they were worth keeping.

I’ve started rating the books I read on LibraryThing (with the nominal goal of getting rid of books that I don't rate highly enough), but I’ve already noticed that I tend to second-guess myself if I happen to notice the ratings later.  “Why did I give that book two stars?  It wasn’t that bad,” I’ll say to myself, or, “How could I have given both these books four and a half stars?  This one is much better than that one.”  Apparently I’m still working on my idea of just how much these stars are worth.