I joined BookCrossing for a couple of reasons, partly because the concept of tracking something that you don't have anymore is exciting, and partly because I desperately needed to thin out my book collection as part of a massive household decluttering project, and couldn't bear the idea of simply tossing any of them. Whether or not I even read them anymore, my books are too precious to me to throw out, although they take up far, far too much room in our little house. But if I can share them with an unknown stranger, send them on a crazy journey, and possibly hear from them again in the future, then that's completely different from just getting rid of them. I know there are books I'll never be able to part with permanently, but for the ones that aren't doing me much good at the moment and are just taking up space, it's a relief to know that I now have the psychological justification I need to declutter my home and give others some great books that I'm not using right now!

With respect to my rating system:

All it will tell you is how much I personally liked the experience of reading a given book. I'm an amateur reader, not one of those people who has read a dozen treatises on critical analysis, and I didn't major in English in college. So my perceptions of "good" and "bad" literature might deviate from the traditional sense of what makes a book worthwhile. I'm in it for the fun, for the story, for the sake of thinking about something new. Please try not to be offended if I didn't like an important classic work of literature. I'm no scholar, just a schmuck who likes to read things. So I'm willing to accept that some book is important for XYZ reasons, but even though it deserves a 10 for being thought-provoking and culturally relevant, I might give it a 1 because I thought it was boring. I just figure it's easier and more honest to base my rating for a book solely on how much I enjoyed the experience of reading it, rather than how important I thought it was or how intellectually superior I would seem if I said I liked it.