231 Book Reviews: A Master List of Every Book I've Ever Read
- Sarah Koenig
- Feb 24, 2021
- 5 min read
Updated: Jan 8, 2022
Okay, so “every book I’ve ever read” might be an overstatement considering I can’t remember many of the books that I read in childhood but this is at least every review of novels I’ve read over the last few years with a continually growing number of reviews.
I read a wide variety of genres ranging from non-fiction high fantasy popular novels such as the Throne of Glass series and A Court of Thorns and Roses series to lesser-known non-fiction novels such as The Poison Squad and biographies such as Born a Crime. Regardless of what you’re looking for, I hope you can find some recommendations here that you will enjoy! My goal is to help you find what you’re interested in reading.
Below you will find a view of my reviews organized by author and title that lists the overall rating, spice, what genres each book or series belongs to, trigger warnings, whether it is a complete series, adapted for television, has earned awards, and more. Further down you can find links to all of the genres I have written reviews under.
My rating system for the overall quality of the book greatly limits the number of one and five-star reviews that I give out. A book gets one star only if it is so terrible that I could not finish it, or was triggering, traumatizing, or otherwise for no reason. If a book got a one-star rating I not only don’t recommend reading it but consider it damaging to its readers. If a book gets five stars, it was life-changing, or I have enjoyed it so much that I have continually reread it. Books that initially got four stars may move up to five stars if I go back to reread it several times because even if the quality of the book isn’t the best in the world, I connected to it more deeply than the other books on my shelves. A two-star rating means that the book was bad and I probably wouldn’t recommend it, but it wasn’t horrible and I might give it another chance. If a book gets three stars it was okay, I liked it but I didn’t love it. If a book gets four stars then I enjoyed it and would probably recommend it.
Here you can find a complete list of all of my five-star reads and my favorite tropes.
I have an entirely separate rating for “spice” which is just in reference to how much sex is in the book. I read both young adult novels and erotica and I want to be certain that my audience knows how to judge whether the sexual content is age-appropriate for them and something that they are comfortable with. Because of this, any level of sex gets a one-star spice rating. This is a young adult-appropriate level of spice and something I would be comfortable recommending to mature middle school audiences. A two-star spice rating means that the book has one or two sex scenes included. A three-star spice rating means that the book has a few sex scenes, but sex is not maneuvering the plot, and the book would still be very good if you chose to skip over the sex scenes entirely. A four-star spice rating is now in the range of book porn or erotica. There is a plot that exists within the novel beyond sex. A five-star spice rating is very rare but references books that are essentially just sex, they exist solely for the sake of sex, and if you’re looking for a novel that gets to the pornographic content quickly one of these is likely to do that for you.
If the novel is not listed under this master list of reviews it may be under my Neverending To Be Read List which features hundreds of novels I hope to read and include a brief summary of what the book is about based on the excerpt on Goodreads and Storygraph, both of which you can follow me on to see updates on what I'm reading right now!
If you have a trigger that you would like to exclude from the book recommendations below you can use the "Filter" feature, select "Add Filter," select "Trigger Warnings," and then choose "has none of" on the drop-down menu, and then select your trigger from the selection of Trigger Warnings. While Trigger Warnings and whether they actually serve to prevent trauma is debatable, I do think it is important to have the option to be able to protect yourself from something that you know is personally traumatizing, and have done my best to recognize what things may traumatize people with triggers that are different than my own.
Comments