The Goodreads editors are back at it again, number crunching and bringing us all the interesting user data from their 125+ million members. This latest list looks at popular books published from 2014-2023, but there’s a bit of a twist—the list doesn’t look at how well these books did when they were first published. Rather, it looks at how they are currently doing.
By looking at books published the last decade that its members are reading and recommending now, Goodreads is not only highlighting books that have been popular the whole time, like Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, but also looking at ones whose popularity is just now taking shape.
As an aside, I was fully prepared (and kind of expecting) to see an upward trend in the list when it comes to diversity, but I didn’t. The shorter list for 2016 contains four non-white authors out of the eight mentioned compared to the one mentioned in 2023, for instance. Clicking on the subheading for each year does take you to the full list of books published that year that are popular on the site, but diversity isn’t improved much in the full lists.
In any case, it is still always interesting to look at what makes it to readers’ TBRs. Below is a sampling of the books that made the list, which include romantasy, historical fiction, memoirs, and more.
Books Published in 2021
Seven Days in June by Tia Williams
Books Published in 2020
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett