eclectic academia

While I love the star rating system (it's so spacey) I felt that a bit more detail would be handy. My star ratings typically represent how much I got out of a book, or even just how much I enjoyed it. The four ratings outlined below (each out of 4; don't ask why, I'm not entirely sure myself) represent a set of more objective measures: the difficulty of the content, the interest and insight of the work, the clarity of expression, and, finally, the quality of the writing style.

On each review I plan to stick up a score of 1-4 for each of these categories.

How many cogs are turning?

Some topics are just hard. Irrespective of the author's skills in expressing these ideas, certain things are just difficult to get to grips with. Topics like the categorisation of clouds are easy to grasp. So easy, in fact, the author's primary role is not expositional, but stylistic: how the hell do you make big balls of fluff in the sky interesting? Other books, on topics like the role of Shanon Entropy in information theory, or pretty much any area of General Relativity, are somewhat less easy to get to grips with. 

How enlightening/insightful are the contents of the work?
 
In the parlance of my rural county of birth (Norfolk) "oi luv a gud oi-dea me". The whole point of books, particularly non-fiction books, and even more particularly academic and pseudo-academic books is to express thoughts, ideas and arguments. That doesn't mean that these have to be expressions of hard fact or truth (as if we could expect that!) but we have to hope that the ideas expressed are insightful, innovative and novel. I think we can also all agree that baseless claims, factual inaccuracies, fallacious arguments, boring cliché etc. are all marks against a piece of work. 

How clear is it?
Clarity is essential; it's integral; it's key. Of course, this is somewhat dependent on how technical and difficult the topic of the book is. The harder the content, the greater the challenge facing an author who wishes to present the ideas clearly and accessibly. But taking this into account; how good is the author at doing this? Does she fall into the trap of speaking in technobabble? Is her work mostly constituted by nonsense terminology? Or does she express even the most technical and difficult of ideas in a way that even the lowliest of readers (i.e. - me!) can get to grips with what she's saying? 

How much style does the author have?
Sure, clarity and insight are important elements of style, but leaving these aside, how well written is it? Let's be honest: some academics are not the best writers (I certainly count myself in that batch, though I'm not proud to admit it!). Is it quotable? Does it really draw you in, engaging your interest? Basically: is it pretty?