The Most Popular Books on Goodreads From the Last 5 Years

We stay booed up with Goodreads. Despite its flaws, it’s such a treasure trove of self-reported information on readers, and with its more than 100 million members, it’s still the biggest book-focused social site. What’s more, its editors love to crunch numbers.

Their latest stat pulling has come in the form of the most popular books published in the last five years. To assemble the list, which is ranked in order, they looked at the books added to Goodreads members’ Want to Read, Currently Reading, or (already) Read lists, and tallied up the results.

If you’ve been following publishing the last few years, you’ve definitely heard about a lot of the top books, but I’ll skip around to make sure I include some diversity—the first non-white author doesn’t come until #18 (Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow), the shame of it all.

Looking though the list, you can see the popularity of mysteries and thrillers, romances, fantasies (and romantasies), and historical fiction. There’s hardly any nonfiction books on the list at all, though—the only ones I noticed are Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart and I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy. Maybe the Goodreads Girlies prefer fiction to real life? Can’t say I blame them.

In any case, here are the most popular books on Goodreads from the last five years: