The Book of Ratings: Opinions, Grades, and Assessments of Everything Worth Thinking About (Paperback)

by Lore Fitzgerald Sjoberg (Author) "The quintessential Hostess food, superficially similar to foods you might create in your own kitchen, yet profoundly different..." (more)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
“Lore Fitzgerald Sjöberg could be talking about bowling shoes and still be funny (speaking of which, the low-fashion shoes rank C–, right below actual bowling).” —Washington Post

Are you harshly judgmental? Yes! Do you walk around snidely rating everything in your path? Of course you do! You can’t help it—it’s just too easy and too much fun to rate everything from your coworkers and dates to restaurants and supermodels.

The Book of Ratings, which grades and compares everyday items in its own unique way, is the ultimate catalog of the most mundane and most hilarious rankings around.

For instance: Have you ever considered marsupials?
Koalas: Koala bears eat only one thing, day in and day out. Koalas look cuddly, but they’re actually irritable, solitary beasts who do not want belly rubs. What kind of mocking god created creatures with poofy ears and big black noses that don’t want belly rubs? B

Opossums: North America gets one lousy marsupial, and let’s just say it’s not going to win any beauty contests. Or even not-ugly contests. C–

Wombats: “Wombat” is a great name. It’s got a “wom” and a “bat,” and an “omba.” They’re kind of nondescript animals, cute in a generic pudgy mammal way, but their name spelled backward is “tabmow,” and that makes all the difference. A

The Book of Ratings is hysterically arbitrary and undeniably infectious.

About the Author
Lore Fitzgerald Sjöberg lives in the San Francisco Bay area.His hobbies include doubt, ennui, angst, regret, uncertainty, resignation, and puppetry.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press; 1 edition (October 22, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609808524
• ISBN-13: 978-0609808528
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #815,251 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lore is a god. The end., March 7, 2003

By A Customer

Okay, maybe not the end, but let me tell you something. Here it is: If you have never read this book or gone to Brunching.com, you are seriously missing out. Of course some people might not like this book. Y'know like the ones who can't read and have trouble with the big words but if someone read it to them, then yes, a drink to nose connection would probably be made if they were drinking something. Which we will assume they were.

Lore does use quite a bit of vocabulary and pop-culture references in his ratings but even if some of them go over your head you're bound to get most. There's even a rating for "References from the last rating" where he rates some of the more obscure or over the headish references he made in the previous rating.

Bottom line: Buy this book. Immediately. That means now. Go. Now.

(If you want to see if the book is for you go to Brunching.com and check out the ratings. It probably is.)

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars He speaks my language!, January 6, 2003

By	N. Bernadsky "ski429" (Conway, AR United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I bought this book after my best friend and I nearly got kicked out of a bookstore because we were laughing so hard. Lore uses words like "bask", and adds suffixes like "-ish" and "-ness" whenever he wants. It's great! It's how my friends and I talk! It annoys people who don't get it! The only thing that would make it better is if it came packaged with a Pez dispenser featuring Lore. Now that would make it an A+. Due to its current lack of accompanying somewhat-strawberry flavored sugar bricks, I must give it an A. But a big A. A huge, towering A.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars very funny!, February 19, 2003

By	Joe Sherry (Minnesota) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This was my Valentine's Day gift. My girlfriend tells me that I'm so opinionated about stuff that I could have written this book. She may be right. I think I can remember yelling "but Twinkies [are gross]!" while reading the book. Maybe I just thought it very loud. I've never been to the website that this guy rates stuff for, but Sjoberg rates everything under the sun (from the Seven Dwarfs, to food made by Hostess, to national sports, to....well, anything and everything). It's very interesting.

The structure of the book is in two to three page segments, each one covering a topic. Sjoberg picks several aspects of the topic, give a brief rating of each, and then a letter grade (an example of this would be the Seven Dwarfs as a topic, and then each dwarf gets a short paragraph and the letter grade). The book is consistently amusing with some very funny one-liners tacked in there.

I liked this book, it reminded me of high school where we would make all sorts of lists and put them in order of best to worst. This is a better written extension of that.