The book doesn’t matter for this story, I’ve mostly stopped naming it when I tell this, but the short version is I finished it at eleven at night, closed it, and immediately felt that specific electric feeling you get maybe a handful of times a year, the sense that you’ve just read something that’s rearranged you slightly. I gave it five stars right then, in my head, no hesitation, told two people the next day it was one of the best things I’d read in years. About ten days later, going back through my notes for something unrelated, I reread my own summary of the plot and felt almost nothing. The high had genuinely evaporated, and what was left underneath it wasn’t a bad book, just a fine one, one I’d wildly overrated in the glow of finishing it.

That gap between the eleven o’clock feeling and the ten day later feeling is the whole reason I don’t fully trust my own rating anymore until some time has passed. It’s not that the immediate reaction is fake, it’s real, it’s just measuring something different than what actually stays with you, more like measuring the height of a wave than the depth of the water underneath it. I’ve started deliberately sitting on a rating for at least a week now before I consider it final, and more than once the number has moved, sometimes up, a book that seemed merely good keeps surfacing in my thoughts unprompted and earns an extra star for actually sticking, sometimes down, the way that first one did.

Ted thinks this is overthinking a number nobody’s grading me on, and he’s probably not wrong, it’s a low stakes habit to be this careful about. But my job is built around the idea that a first impression of what someone said isn’t automatically the accurate record of it, you go back, you check it against the tape, you correct where the immediate hearing was wrong. I think I’ve just quietly applied the same discipline to my own reactions, and once you notice how often the first read and the settled read disagree, it’s hard to unnotice it.