Fewer spoilers, and maybe a rating system?

It seems like I change how I do things in my blogging and as I'm reading at least once a year. Now, instead of taking notes that allow me to do really detailed synopses (something I think I adopted while reading After School Nightmare, annoyed when yet another detail from a previous volume turned out to be really important), I take detailed notes about what I'm thinking as I read the book (or watch the anime, or read the manga). This has helped me immensely in writing my commentaries, because I was getting to the point where I could write detailed synopses, but then I couldn't think of anything interesting to say in my commentaries. I'm trying, slowly, to move beyond including major spoilers in my synopses.

One of the things I'm considering doing is adopting a rating system. Quite a few other book blogs I pay attention to use ratings. As a reader, I've appreciated it, because it makes it easy to see, at a glance, what the reviewer thought about the work. As a blogger, I chose not to rate things, because writing commentaries was often hard enough - I didn't want to also have to figure out ratings.

I may change my mind about that, now that my commentaries have gotten easier to write. Most of my posts are very long, so a quickie rating might be good. I'm not looking forward to rating works that are hard to rate, but I suppose I could handle situations like that the same way the reviewer of Wuthering Heights did it over at Dear Author.

My earliest posts look incredibly different from my most recent posts, so it's not like this blog has been very consistent in its format overall. It wouldn't hurt to try ratings for a while and see how things go. First, though, I'll need to decide what my rating system will be. I may go with the one mentioned in the most current post over at Stainless Steel Droppings, or I may try something else. Letter grades might be good, since letter grades have occurred to me for certain works in the past. Hmm...