Five Stars

After a string of disappointing reads, the bookish gods smiled upon me. Right at the end of my 2023 reading challenge (I’m currently at 94 books out of my goal of 100), I hit upon four five-star reads in a row.

To demonstrate how rare this is, I should explain my very strict rating system on Goodreads—the book-tracking platform that I love to hate and hate to love. Many of you might have no idea what I’m talking about here, but this is an ongoing drama in my life: whether to put up with the dismal user experience on Jeff Bezos’ platform or find an alternative. I know there are some who will say that StoryGraph is the superior website for tracking one’s reading habits, but StoryGraph lacks a social function; most of my best friends use Goodreads, and I scroll through their updates as regularly as I check Instagram.

When you log that you’ve finished a book on Goodreads, the platform gives you the option to rate the book from 1 to 5 stars. This is, famously, a fucked-up system, yet one that I take very seriously in my own corner of the internet. 

Starting from the lowest possible rating, a one-star book robbed me of my brain cells. I sacrificed hours of my life that I cannot get back, that I likely only endured so that I can back up my claim that this was one of the worst books I’ve ever read. Of the 536 books I’ve marked as “read,” only 18 of them were one-star reads—among them are The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins, Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, Verity by Colleen Hoover, City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert, and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. (It’s called range!)

Two-star books were not a waste of my time. The most important metric is that they must have disappointed me somehow. Sure, this is sometimes a product of my expectations, but it can also be a failure of what I perceive to be the book’s project. This is a significantly more common rating than one star and is not itself a condemnation, though I’ll likely forget specifics about the book soon.

When I rate a book three stars, I picture myself giving the author a thumbs up and saying, “Yep, that was a book!” Writing a book is a huge accomplishment in itself, and they did it! And I read it. This is probably the most common rating I give. This is not a bad rating. Plenty of perfectly fine books land in this category, along with books that I thoroughly enjoyed. The writing might have lacked some strong element that would have elevated it to the next tier.

When I give a book four stars, I picture myself shaking my head and whistling slowly (I can’t whistle), then saying, “Damn. That was a good book.” These books stick with me for a while and shape my taste or worldview. I’m lucky to have read dozens of these books in my life so far: My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland, The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, Recollections of my Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, please). I’ll recommend them widely and often. 

But after a five-star read, I consider myself a changed woman. These books shaped my soul, more than just my aesthetic sensibility. These books are precious to me, if not always perfectly written. If you want to understand who I am as a person, talk to me about Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion, The Mysterious Benedict Society series by Trenton Lee Stewart, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, or They’re Going to Love You by Meg Howrey.

Only 63 books I’ve ever read qualify for this highest echelon—four of which I read in the last week. I’d like to review them each briefly for you, with some of my favorite quotes included, as you might also be trying to meet a reading goal in the last month of the year.

Wellness by Nathan Hill

My prediction from two weeks ago was correct. After his 2016 debut novel The Nix (four stars), I had high hopes for Wellness that Hill well exceeded. When we look back on the novels that do justice to the experience of living in the early 21st century, which can often feel just as primitive as it is technologically dystopian, I think Wellness should top the list (taking other suggestions for inclusion … No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood … ?)

Both of Hill’s novels are symphonic in scope; he weaves together so many seemingly disparate subjects that together crescendo into profundity when you least expect it. As with The Nix, patience pays off here. The book is tender, challenging, and life-affirming in a rare and vital combination.

Were they destined for each other? Was he even right for her? She did not know. She wasn’t sure of anything right now. She could not be certain she could ever love Jack as grandly, as unconditionally, as he needed. She understood that there was some fantastical and elevated place where his love awaited, and she was never certain she could join him there, whether her heart was capable of it. But she knew she loved him right now. And she would probably love him tomorrow. And maybe that was good enough. Maybe she didn’t have to be certain of anything. Maybe the human heart was just that messy, and all romance was deeply precarious, and the future was unresolved, and that was fine. Maybe that’s what true love actually was: an embrace of the chaotic unfolding. And maybe the only stories that had neat and certain conclusions were lies and fables and conspiracies. Maybe it was like Dr. Sanborne said: certainty was just a story the mind created to defend itself against the pain of living. Which meant, almost by definition, that certainty was a way to avoid living. You could choose to be certain, or you could choose to be alive.

And the only thing she was certain of was this: that between ourselves and the world are a million stories, and if we don’t know which among them are true, we might as well try out those that are the most humane, most generous, most beautiful, most loving.

Was Jack her soulmate?

Sure, she thought. Why not?

Finally he saw her. She was waving at him, and he waved back at her now, just as he had waved at her the night they first met, when he rushed over to her in a darkened dive bar and asked her to come with. She smiled at him, and both their faces were lit brilliant, and as they stared at each other, separated by the length of the alley, they were both asking the same thing—though they did not know it—exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. They were asking: Could you ever love someone as broken, as pathetic, as me?

Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

This won’t be the first or the last time I write about my love for speculative fiction, and Zhang’s novel is just delicious. She writes of a future in which the planet is covered in an opaque smog, induced by pollution and changing climate patterns, eliminating all agriculture as we know it. The narrator, a despairing chef, applies for a mysterious job in the Italian alps, on one of the last land areas still experiencing sunlight. The ultra-rich have created a food haven—with distinctly cult-like qualities—and the narrator discovers the cost of this rarified air. This one is a slow-burn psychological thriller for the foodies. The prose is fittingly hazy, so readers should get comfortable with ambiguity.

Reproduction by Louisa Hall

I had the privilege of hearing Hall at a Texas Book Festival panel on “The Monstrosity of Motherhood,” along with local author and Texas Ex Chandler Baker and Szilvia Molnar, author of The Nursery (which was recently included on “best of the 2023” lists by both the New York Times and the New York Review of Books).

Hall says she felt bereft when, as she was trying to conceive and then having her first child, she could not turn to literature as she always had to provide guidance and comfort. There were thousands—tens of thousands—of books written about being in love or coming of age, but slim to none about being pregnant.

This novel includes three distinct attempts at finding language for her new physical reality (miscarriage, morning sickness, contractions, postpartum hemorrhage, and more). The work of autofiction begins as the narrator is starting a novel about Mary Shelley’s life—and starting to try to have a baby. Shelley lost multiple children, whether in utero or early in their childhood. Her magnum opus, Frankenstein, betrays a preoccupation with creation gone awry, as both a writer and a mother.

The first section of Reproduction, called “Conception, 2018” is a sort of travelogue, like the kind Shelley wrote while she was traversing Europe with her intemperate lover Percy Shelley. The second section, “Birth, 2019” devolves into absurdity, as the author endures an extended and extremely painful labor. “Science Fiction, 2021” borrows from this genre, as the narrator begins again to try for a second child and considers the technological advances in fertility treatments, in the context of a resurfaced friendship.

The premise may sound complicated, but it’s plainly honest in a way that I aspire to in my own writing.

It was a vivid time in Mary [Shelly’s] life. She felt, she said, like a “character in a novel.” She felt like a “romance incarnate”: as though once, she had been a mere idea, and now she had been given a body.

Had I really rested in those patches of sunlight? Had I really read about the Moomins, had I really been happy? Or was I just happy in the way people get angry so they don’t have to feel guilty, or anxious so they don’t have to feel depressed? Or vicious so they don’t have to feel helpless? Or happy, so very happy they don’t have to feel anything other than overwhelming happiness?

Pain, she’d written, is defined by its refusal to be expressed. Its refusal to be expressed is essential to what it is. In fact, she said, if pain can be expressed, it becomes something other than pain. And if other states of consciousness (loneliness, for instance, or fear) cannot find a way to express themselves, they will be nothing other than painful.

Pure Colour by Sheila Heti

This novel begins with an origin myth in which we are living in the end times of the first draft of creation. In order to judge his work and prepare for a second shot at it, God splits himself into three entities: a bird hovering above the earth, a fish amidst creation, and a bear holding the world. In this story, every person is one of these three archetypes; our main character, Mira, is a bird.

Her father is a bear, and, as such, they seem doomed to misunderstand each other. After her father dies, Mira undergoes a Kafkaesque transformation, joining with her father’s spirit to inhabit a leaf together. This section made the least sense to me, but the other sections offer poignant commentary on art and relationship that left me in awe.

This book likely not for the lay reader: There’s not a driving plot, and—I can’t stress this enough—the protagonist temporarily turns into a leaf. If you’re willing to dance with a more abstruse, metatextual crowd, it’s really beautiful.

At least God had given the sunrise—to those of us who lived on a cliff. At least he had given us a bit of love—if not enough to see us through to the end of our lives. Here in the first draft of existence, we crafted our own second drafts—stories and books and movies and plays—polishing our stones to show God and each other what we wanted the next draft to be, comforting ourselves with our visions. On good days, we acknowledged that God had done pretty well: he had given us life, and had filled in most of the blanks of existence, except for the blank in the heart.

An artist is driven to make art by the spirit inside of them, making an artwork like a signal or flare calling out, beckoning its kin to come near. This is why an artist never tires of their task. A bird finds it hard to attend to one person, and this is the reason why: because they have a desperate need—to create an aesthetic surface to put between themselves and the world, to make the spirits whole. Then how well can we expect a bird to love, when they are daily applying their love to a surface? While a bear isn’t driven to love through a surface: they join with other creatures much more directly.

She picked it up, and the seashell seemed to speak to her, saying, You will have so many more years of living, and the years will draw you far from this time when you feel so bad, and time will crust over everything, and so much more will happen to you, and though the present is all you have right now, it will all be far in the past one day, something from another time, like everything I have moved beyond, as an ancient seashell, I don’t remember my youth, do you think I do?—and the things I did when I was shiny and new, now I’m an old shell, like you will one day be, so take me with you as a reminder that this present moment will one day be gone, and its troubles buried beneath so many layers of living.