I tapped 5 stars on Lincoln in the Bardo when it changed how I processed the loss of my dad. I tapped 5 stars on Trust when it showed me a new form of writing. I tapped 5 stars on Stoner after chewing on it for two months.
Three completely different reading experiences. One number for all of them.
I was sharing my best-of-2025 list with a friend. I sorted my Goodreads and it felt like Excel. Rows of titles with numbers next to them. I found myself saying things like "this was 4 stars, but an incredibly unique approach to the normal murder mystery" — because the rating didn't carry what I actually wanted to say.
Goodreads was fine, but it always felt like I wasn't capturing what I needed, and wasn't finding what I wanted.
The rating told me I liked it. It didn't tell me why.
Back to the friend. The issue - just look at Reddit- is that we don't talk about books in stars. We talk about them in dimensions, the factors that moved them for us:
- Craft — Was the prose itself worth paying attention to?
- Mind — Did it make me think about something differently?
- Heart — Did it move me? (Any direction counts.)
- Pacing — Could I stop reading?
- Originality — Had I read anything like this before?
Demon Copperhead, for me, scored 4 on Craft, 5 on Heart, 5 on Pacing, but 2 on Originality. That's not a criticism — it's Dickens retold in Appalachia, and it knows exactly what it's doing. The dimensions tell you where the book hits for me, not just whether it hits. Now we're talking
1Q84 scored high on Originality and Mind - I can see where people really respect a groundbreaking work. But absolutely bottomed out on Craft (repetitive, droning syntax) Pacing and Heart (absolutely no character connection). "Ambitious yet frustrating literary puzzle." That synopsis wrote itself once the dimensions were there.
I built InkTree so I could capture what I felt, not a score. Five sliders. A few tags. A private note if something needs to stay private. Done.
The system generates a 5-6 word synopsis from your dimensions — a fingerprint of how the book landed for you. Not a summary of the plot. A summary of the experience.
Why? Because this experience is what I chase - palate cleansers, brain busters, unique meta-narratives. That's my reading journey. And to create the ultimate discovery platform, I needed to start by diagnosing my own tastes.
InkTree is in beta right now. About 20 readers are using it. I'm building it alone, in the open, and I'd genuinely love feedback from anyone who's ever looked at their reading history and thought "this tells me nothing about what I actually felt."
That's the whole thing. Not a social network. Not a review platform. A reader's companion for processing what you read and discovering what's next.