Highest Rated Books on My TBR
This is a random post for my on personal research. I want to know which books on my TBR have the highest ratings on Goodreads. I will just sort my TBR by rating, which is a thing you can do on Goodreads. Then I'm going to take out the books that have ratings, but aren't actually published yet. I'll give you the top ten. The ratings are out of 5 stars. In my mind, anything about a 3.75 is a good rating.
Prize For the Fire by Rilla Askew - Here is our first surprise. This novel set in 16th century England. Askew lives here in Oklahoma. Most of her books are set here, but this one is a divergence. It has a 4.65 rating out of 57 ratings and is the highest rated book on my TBR.
Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros - This one has been all over social media. OK, remember how I said that last one had the highest rating? I lied. Or Goodreads lied. This one is at 4.66 with over 382,000 ratings. I think Goodreads is drunk.
The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson - This book is over a decade old. That is probably why it has over 444,000 ratings. It's a good sign for my reading pleasure that it has a rating of 4.65. That's honestly a ridiculous rating for any book, really. Especially for a book that is first in a series.
Kingdom of Ash by Sarah J. Maas - Now this one is a less surprising 4.65. It's the 7th book in a series. Sane people don't read 7 books in a series they hate, so the probability that the readers will rate it highly is pretty good. Also, it has almost 1000 pages. You really have to want to read it to even pick it up. Which, apparently, 362,000+ people did.
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones - This book came out in 2019 and then sat under the radar for awhile. I'm not sure what boosted it's popularity, other than the Black Lives Matter movement. I only heard about it a couple of years ago. It's still not super popular with only 16,000 ratings. But those 16,000 people really like it as it has a 4.63 rating.
Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver by Mary Oliver - What's not to like about Mary Oliver? Poetry is notoriously under-valued, so the fact that this managed to make the top ten out of almost 1000 books means it must be pretty damn good. It has a 4.58 from 14,000 ratings.
Queen of Shadows by Sarah J. Maas - And we have another Throne of Glass book on the list. This is number 4 in the series and the book I am currently at in my read-through. 545,000 people gave this an average rating of 4.57 stars. That bodes well for me.
A Swim In a Pond In the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders - This is surprising to me because I have heard a lot of complaints about this book. That being said, the 16,000 people who have bothered to rate it gave it an average of 4.55 stars. That is an unbelievably high rating for an uber-academic overview of MFA students studying Russian lit. Saunders is a professor at Syracuse University, so I have to give it a sniff.
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe - This one is absolutely no surprise. I've heard amazing things about everything this author has written. This one is about the way the Sackler family boosted the opioid epidemic and gained enormous wealth from it. Nearly 87,000 people have it at 4.54 stars.
Beastie Boys Book by Michael Diamon and Adam Horovitz - The surprise here is that fewer than 12,000 people have rated this stunner. It has an average of 4.54 stars, which is fantastic, but I thought more people would rate it. The Beasties have been around for 40 years. Maybe the demographic who likes them are really book readers.
So there are the top ten highest-rated books on my TBR according to Goodreads.
This was fun! Maybe I'll do a lowest rated books list some time.