(4 mins read)
If you average my last three Goodreads ratings, you get 3.3 out of 5. A perfectly ordinary reading month.
But that number hides quite a bit. One of these books I rated 5 stars. Another got 2. And I felt very different things while reading each of them.
The one that hurt: A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall (5 stars)
The story is built around a school bus accident. Several young children died, and one of them was Abed Salama’s son.
What stayed with me first wasn’t the accident itself, but everything around it.
The book shows Palestinians as people living their lives. They raise children, build relationships, and find small moments of happiness, all while the occupation shapes almost every part of their daily existence. I realised how rarely I get to see this side of their lives. Most of what I read about Palestinians comes through headlines, statistics, and political arguments.
As the story unfolds, you begin to see how much of what led to that day was preventable. The restrictions, the discrimination, the neglect, the unequal treatment. None of these caused the accident directly, but they made everything surrounding it, and everything that followed, so much harder to bear.
The title speaks of one day, but the book stretches across decades of history. At times, this made it feel less focused than I expected. But I also understood why that history was necessary. You cannot fully understand the tragedy without understanding the system around it.
The hardest part came at the end. So little has changed, and in many ways, things may have become worse. The grief is personal, but the injustice is systemic.
I gave it five stars. Not because I enjoyed reading it. I didn’t, and I don’t think that’s the point. I gave it five stars because stories like this need to be heard, remembered, and taught.
The one I wanted to love: My Friends by Fredrik Backman (2 stars)
I adore Fredrik Backman. And that’s probably why My Friends disappointed me so much.
It has almost everything he usually does well: friendship, grief, trauma, quirky characters, art, and big emotional moments. But for me, it felt like a book trying very hard to mean something. And somewhere along the way, I could see the effort.
The friendship was my biggest problem. Four teenagers who remain so emotionally central to each other 25 years later, remembering their teenage years in extraordinary detail? I’m 37, and I can barely reconstruct what I was doing at 15.
Then there’s the painting. The entire story treats it as something almost sacred. I understand what Backman is trying to say about art, memory, and belonging. But I never quite felt it. It seemed less like the painting naturally carried all that meaning and more like the story needed it to, so everyone had to act accordingly.
In fairness, I listened to most of the book as an audiobook at the gym. Maybe I missed something between sets. But even after accounting for that, I finished with one thought: Was that it?
I know it has a 4.4 rating from hundreds of thousands of readers. Clearly, it worked for a lot of people. I’m just not one of them, and that’s fine. You can love an author and still not love one of their books.
The one written in letters: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (3 stars)
The story is told entirely through letters. I liked how the book trusted me to piece Sybil’s life together on my own. That was probably its biggest strength.
The first half felt slow, though, and I struggled to connect with Sybil. The writing is lovely, and the book handles ageing, love, and loss with care. But the ending felt a little too neat and a little too hopeful for the life that came before it.
And there was one question that followed me through the entire book.
The story takes place somewhere between 2015 and 2020. There were phones. There was WhatsApp. There were text messages and DMs. So why on earth was everyone writing letters?
Sybil could have saved everyone a lot of postage with one phone call.
If you have a good answer to this, I would genuinely like to hear it.
What the stars were really measuring
Looking back, I realise my ratings weren’t measuring the same thing.
The 5 wasn’t about enjoyment. It was about how much a book matters.
The 2 wasn’t about bad writing. It was about the distance between what I expected and what I actually felt.
The 3 was about admiring something without quite connecting with it.
We use stars to rate books, but they can only tell you so much. They squeeze very different reactions into the same five boxes, making them look more comparable than they really are.
The part I should say plainly
I wouldn’t recommend the last two books, at least not without a few caveats.
I read My Friends and The Correspondent mostly because everyone seemed to be reading them. The ratings were high, the reviews were warm, and my feed kept putting them in front of me. So I went with the trend.
The first book was different. I picked it on purpose, and it was the one I’ll remember.
I work with data, so I should have known better. A 4.4 average tells you how a crowd felt. It can’t tell you how you will.
