Hello and welcome to the first day of (my) blogmas! Where most people do blogmas the first 24 days of December, I am going to be doing 12 days of blogmas, where I post every day between Christmas and January 6th.
For the first day, I am sharing every book that I read for the first time in 2021 and rated five stars. Part of the reason I wanted to share all my five star books is because, as they are the best of the best, they are all in the running for my top ten favorite books of the year. In fact, I can basically already tell you that my top ten books of the year ARE on this list, but I’m not going to tell you which ones, because that is a post for later.
What is a Five Star Book?
For me, a five star rating is either a book that I absolutely loved, connected with, and continuously think about, or a book that is objectively so good I have to rate it five stars, even if my personal connection to it might have been closer to a four star. These are the types of books that I might recommend to someone unprompted, and that I want to purchase personal copies of.
There are 18 books on this list, which means about 12% of the books I read this year I rated 5 stars. Which I like to think makes this list exclusive, but not ridiculously so. I have listed them in order of when I read them, starting with the beginning of the year and ending at the…end. So without further ado, here are all the books I rated 5 stars this year!
Every 5 Star Book I Read This Year
- I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown
- Watch Over Me by Nina LaCour
- The Ex Talk by Rachel Lynn Solomon
- Felix Ever After by Kacen Callendar
- The Dead and the Dark by Courtney Gould
- The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
- Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
- One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston
- Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
- Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
- The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
- The Woman who Smashed Code by Jason Fagone
- Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert
- Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo
- The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes
- Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai
- Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Fienberg
- Emma by Jane Austen
There you have it, every book I rated five stars in 2021! Thank you so much for reading, I hope to see you back tomorrow for my second day of blogmas!
Reading with Delaney 
What a great list! I’ll need to go back and check out your reviews for these books, since I’d love to hear more about your rating/reviewing process. I always feel kind of torn when I can tell that a book is objectively great but my personal reading experience falls short of that; it’s like *I* failed the book, which is a ridiculous sentiment. Do you ever feel like that when you give a 5 star rating?
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Thank you! I definitely know what you mean about feeling like you failed a book. I would say there are about three books on this list that I normally wouldn’t have rated five stars because I didn’t personally connect to them, but objectively they were so well-written and so important, that I ended up giving them five stars anyway.
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