every book i've given five stars
postcard 11: on the shelf episode 3! good book recommendations as someone who has read over a thousand
It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it off you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
prelude
I long for a large room to myself, with books and nothing else, where I can shut myself up, and see no one, and read myself into peace.
—Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Violet Dickinson written in October 1904
One thing about me is that i am very very stingy with my 5 star ratings.
This doesn’t mean that I hate literature—I just like having a way to truly distinguish what books i loved throughout my life. I am very strict with my 5 star ratings in order to do the other books on the list justice. Sometimes, I will rate a book 5 stars and then bump it down; sometimes I will rate a book 4 stars and then bump it up. While dynamic, this list is still pretty much set in stone.
Here is how I decide if a book is a true five star for me:
Has plot and writing I consider perfect.
At least two quotes that I write down in my quote glossary.
Stays in my mind for more than a week (as in, it needs to haunt me for a little bit).
Feels magical when I’m reading it. these five star books remind me of why I read and why I love reading.
Elicits strong emotions & makes me feel something.
I consider rereading the book before I pick up a new one.
I text my friends about the book immediately after finishing.
Feels timeless, like they’ll stand the test of time and age.
This was originally going to be a paid post but it’s my birthday month and I just didn’t want to paywall this because it’s so important to me, so here is an extended version of my comprehensive five-star post! This post gets cut off on the email, so read it in the app or on your desktop <3
White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Despite ironically being set at night, this is Dostoyevsky at his most hopeful, idealistic, romantic, and starry. White Nights tells the story of a man who spends his life in solitude, yet dreams in technicolor. Despite reading most of Dostoyevsky’s bibliography, this is the one I return to the most. Melancholy yet beautiful and optimistic, this book is my favorite by him.
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
While it is not straightforward like a conventional memoir, Machado writes with devastating vulnerability and a propulsive cadence that makes this book impossible to put down despite the heaviness of the subject. This reads like folklore or fairytale anthology; like the actual process of building a house, each of Machado's kaleidoscopic chapters amounts to a complete account of an intimate history of her life and her relationship with her former partner. Written like a manifestation of real memories—fragmented, dreamlike, hazy vignettes that are not quite prose but not quite poetry.