My 5 Star Books of Quarantine

I find I have read many great books over my lifetime, but there has to be something very special to make something 5 stars for me. Over quarantine, when I didn’t leave my house for 6 months and my eyes would burn from online classes and facetimes with my friends, I turned to my bookshelf. Many days I would finish a book and immediately pick up another, to be absorbed into the story. The books on this list were different. When I finished them, I couldn’t just begin another immediately. For some reason these books felt like more--I had to sit and exist in their worlds for just a bit longer.

1. A Gentleman in Moscow

I can’t remember exactly when I read this one, but on my first day back in San Diego from University I have a picture of it sitting on my front porch next to a cup of tea. A Gentleman in Moscow was recommended to me over a year ago when I was working in a local bookshop in Wivenhoe, Essex. A customer walked into a shop to purchase two copies as gifts for her friends. She told me that the book changed her -- the writing, the story, the setting. I brushed her off as being a tad dramatic, and I was just excited to find a good book for the first time in a while. I was wrong. A Gentleman in Moscow was so subtle, featuring a man in indefinite house arrest in the Interpol Hotel across the street from the Kremlin. I was shocked at how intricate a world Amor Towles created within the set of just one building. I cared about the characters as though they were my own family members and friends, without even realizing I was falling so deeply into the story. I ended up doing just what the woman in Wivenhoe bookshop did, gifting the book to both my parents and my Grandpa. I’ll end this with a text I got from him after he finished the book.

“Just finished my time with Count Rostov, with tears in my eyes. I hate for the time to end. How wonderful is a good book, thank you.”

2. The Secret Life of Bees

I ordered this book only a few weeks into quarantine. It had been on my “want to read” list for a while and I figured it was about time to get around to it. What I remember the most from this is reading it in my front garden, choking back tears, trying to avoid the looks I got from the people walking their dogs right by. Safe to say it was unexpected how struck I was by the story. I do believe a good book begins with great characters, and the women Sue Monk Kidd created in this were the best of the best. I am and have always been deathly afraid of anything that stings and yet I even considered taking up beekeeping as my quarantine hobby. But mostly I just wanted to exist in the world the book transported me while reading. The blurb on the book says that it is a book about divine female power which doesn’t even begin to sum it up.

3. Olive Kitteridge

Funnily enough, the reason I ended up reading Olive Kitteridge was because months before I accidentally bought the sequel (Olive, Again) at a bookshop, and because of that I was really required to read the first. I knew when purchasing that this won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009, but I couldn’t really understand at first why a book about a retired schoolteacher in Maine would win. After a chapter I understood. Although named for her, the book isn’t really about Olive Kitteridge. It is about the human condition, the intricacies of what it is just to be alive. Each chapter is a different story of a different person living around Olive. Some end in joy, most don’t, but each character has its own unique impact. I didn’t want the stories to end, I wanted them to keep going, to learn about these human beings inhabiting this small town. There are almost no words to explain why Olive Kitteridge meant so much to me. Some enjoy it, some don’t, but for me this will always achieve 5 stars.

4. Nobody’s Fool

I read this one on recommendation from my parents. After a few weeks, I ran out of books I hadn’t read of my own, so I went on the hunt through my parent’s shelves. After going through a large stack of their books, this one caught my attention. I like to say sometimes that the best protagonists are those who should be unlikable. The character of Sully is just that, an old asshole with a bum knee and no friends, but he burrowed his way into my heart. I loved him, I cared for him, I wanted him to succeed even when he was being a dick. Richard Russo manages to make a moving story incredibly witty. I couldn’t pick up another book for two days after finishing Nobody’s Fool. I needed to sit and soak in the words just a little bit longer. I have the sequel, Everybody’s Fool sitting on my nightstand, and I am just waiting to read it for the next time I need a bit of Sully in my life.

5. Girl, Woman, Other

I saw this book everywhere when I was in the U.K. for University. I heard about it on my favorite podcasts, on social media, on TV, and I couldn’t tell you why it took me until quarantine to finally pick it up. Girl, Woman, Other follows one of my favorite forms, each chapter being a story of a different character, in this case a black British woman. Each person intertwined in ways they don’t even know. I couldn’t put this book down. I brought it to the dinner table with me, setting it down next to my plate as I ate and read at the same time. My favorite part, though, was the very end of the book, being so clever and emotional, tying together the stories so well I almost couldn’t believe it. This book captured something magical: reality. I felt as though I was reading about real women and their stories; it didn’t really seem too fabricated or a work of fiction and that is an incredibly hard thing for a writer to achieve.