All the books I read in 2023- ranked with star ratings
I embraced quarter star ratings this year and had the best time ranking all 133 of the books I read
Happy New Year 🎉 I hope you’re starting the new year doing something you enjoy or maybe just relaxing under a cozy blanket with a great book. That’s my plan later today, but first I’m so excited to share all of my 133 books read this year - ranked with star ratings! While I’ve always given my books star ratings, I’ve never ranked them or used quarter stars until this year. So, how did this project come about? Last year, I read Sara from Fiction Matters post in which she ranked all of her books from the entire year in order of enjoyment and I was inspired to do the same, but with star ratings.
Why I love using star ratings is a topic for another post, but I will say that I find star ratings incredibly useful for myself. They help me organize my books, and quickly jog my memory in terms of being able to glance at a title and know what I thought about it. When looking back at my reading, I often forget some books and whether or not I liked them etc. With star ratings, I can look back 5 years ago and quickly see what books I loved and perhaps hated.
I’m no longer using Goodreads (I’ll talk about this more in my yearly reflections post coming soon) and I’m exclusively tracking all of my reading in The Storygraph which I LOVE. The Storygraph allows for quarter star ratings, so I thought why not challenge myself to dig deeper and get even more nuanced in my ratings of each book I read this year. And I have to say, this made a HUGE difference in how I processed my thoughts and feelings when I finished each book.
I’ll be going into greater depth about how I read and how I’ll be tracking my books in 2024 (including where I find books) in a future post, but my overall process for how I tracked and ranked each book this year was fairly basic. I used the notes app on my phone and at the start of each month I started a new note; for example, January Books. As soon as I finished a book, I listed it (title and author) in the corresponding month and after a bit of processing involving asking myself questions about the book and my reading experience, I immediately added the star rating. I then added the books weekly into The Storygraph. What was especially interesting is that I didn’t change ANY of my initial ratings when I sat down to write this post!
Overall, this was such a fun challenge and yearly reading project. The hardest part of ranking these books was my five and three star reads. Once I chose my top 10 for my podcast Book Talk, Etc (you can hear me talk about all of my top 10 in greater detail in this episode), I really struggled with deciding on the order of the rest of my five star books. I read some incredible books this year and the ones I gave five stars to could easily be interchangeable depending on my mood. For now, I’m happy with the rankings I have chosen. I hope you enjoy my list of the 133 books I’ve read this year and maybe find some new to you titles. *This took me several hours to put together which is why it’s for paid subscribers. I truly appreciate everyone who takes the time to read my writing!
If you purchase any books on Bookshop.org using my link, all earnings will be going to Frosted Faces Senior Pet Rescue. I’d love to know if we have any favorites in common, so please let me know in the comments!