Stuck on which book to buy next? The Metacritic website has just added a Books section, with a database of approximately 150 books drawn from the second half of 2004. You won’t find any New Zealand books there – something that will hopefully change – but if you’re about to buy an overseas book and want to know what critics thought of it, the site is worth checking out.

Each book featured on metacritic.com is assigned a ‘Metascore’, which is a weighted average of all of the scores assigned by individual critics to that book. Metascores range from 0-100, with higher scores indicating better overall reviews. The Metascore is a ‘weighted’ average, because more significance is assigned to some critics and publications than others, based on the stature and quality of those critics.

Metacritic plans to add one new book a day to its database, with a sampling of major recent releases in a variety of genres. It’s interesting to note that The Line of Beauty is the current highest rated non-fiction book, followed by Cynthia Ozick’s Heir To The Glimmering World, a complex novel set in Depression-era New York, about an 18-year old orphan and the eccentric family of German exiles who take her in. Non-fiction is led by Kevin Boyle’s Arc of Justice, ‘A Saga Of Race, Civil Rights, And Murder In The Jazz Age’.