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The Most ‘Abandoned’ Books on GoodReads

Which books on GoodReads are most difficult to finish? Estimating proportions in December 2019 gives an entirely different result than absolute counts.

What books are hardest for a reader who starts them to finish, and most likely to be abandoned? I scrape a crowdsourced tag, abandoned, from the GoodReads book social network on 2019-12-09 to estimate conditional probability of being abandoned.

The default GoodReads tag interface presents only raw counts of tags, not counts divided by total ratings (=reads). This conflates popularity with probability of being abandoned: a popular but rarely-abandoned book may have more abandoned tags than a less popular but often-abandoned book. There is also residual error from the winner’s curse where books with fewer ratings are more mis-estimated than popular books. I fix that to see what more correct rankings look like.

Correcting for both changes the top-5 ranking completely, from (raw counts):

  1. The Casual Vacancy, J. K. Rowling

  2. Catch-22, Joseph Heller

  3. American Gods, Neil Gaiman

  4. A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin

  5. The Book Thief, Markus Zusak

to (shrunken posterior proportions):

  1. Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Marlon James

  2. Space Opera, Catherynne M. Valente

  3. Little, Big, John Crowley

  4. The Witches: Salem, 1692, Stacy Schiff

  5. Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan

I also consider a model adjusting for covariates (author/average-rating/year), to see what books are most surprisingly often-abandoned given their pedigrees & rating etc. Abandon rates increase the newer a book is, and the lower the average rating.

Adjusting for those, the top-5 are:

  1. The Casual Vacancy, J. K. Rowling

  2. The Chemist, Stephenie Meyer

  3. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

  4. The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse

  5. Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977–2002), David Sedaris

Books at the top of the adjusted list appear to reflect a mix of highly-popular authors changing genres, and ‘prestige’ books which are highly-rated but a slog to read.

These results are interesting for how they highlight how people read books for many reasons (such as marketing campaigns, literary prestige, or following a popular author), and this is reflected in their decision whether to continue reading or to abandon a book.

The book review website/social network GoodReads (2006–) is probably the single largest book-focused website in the Anglosphere—it is almost as widely used by authors, who as much as they may despise it, can’t live without it. (I was surprised when, reading writer interviews to learn about preferred writing times, how many have given interviews to GoodReads over the years.) I do not recommend GoodReads as it is extremely slow, largely unmaintained post-acquisition, and user-hostile (eg. eliminating the API access which allowed users to escape to better book websites like LibraryThing); nevertheless, it remains the largest book website and some interesting data can be extracted from it. Its functionality is limited, but GoodReads does support user-set tags on books in the form of ‘bookshelves’; one such tag is the GR “abandoned” bookshelf1, which lets people record which books they couldn’t finish reading.2 A (former) GoodReads user myself, I came across that tag and thought to myself that the results were amusing—take that, both highschool English class & J. K. Rowling!—but also totally misleading, since the bookshelf page only shows books sorted by total tags per book.

Little recent data. There aren’t many similar sources for people dropping books. Amazon’s Kindle has allowed for similar inferences by indirectly gauging reader attrition through the distribution of ‘highlights’ (user-made excerpts/notes), under the assumption that highlight-worthy material is uniformly distributed & thus absence of evidence (of highlighting) is evidence of absence (of reading), which Jordan Ellenberg in 2014 to facetiously estimate that Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century was the most abandoned book of 2014. That hasn’t seemed to be updated recently, even though Amazon surely has detailed analytics and knows exactly what books have highest abandonment rates (to address Kindle Unlimited fraud & cabals if nothing else), so GoodReads offers a useful alternative despite all the flaws of haphazardly-collected social media data.

Problems in Ranking by Raw Count

Popularity ≠ Unreadability. It’s no surprise that J. K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy or Catch-22 are at the top of the list, because they are read so often. A really abandonable-book probably would never become popular enough to get enough abandoned-tags to crack the list. (There are only two kinds of books: those people complain about reading, and those people don’t read.)

So as it is, a simple sort-by-count tells us nothing more than a lot of people have read these books. It’d be more interesting to look at something like what books have the highest percentage of abandoned tags versus total reads. GoodReads, as it happens, provides the number of ‘reads’ as recorded by GR users, so that’s good.

Low counts mean sampling error. However, the abandoned counts are also low in an absolute sense: GR displays only the top 25 pages (so we can’t look at least abandoned books), and to make the cutoff requires just 40 tags. In comparison, the most-read book on the list has 6,238,667 reads. The average percentage abandoned of reads is ~0.13%, which is extremely rare (1 in 769); I am certain that books are abandoned at a much higher rate than that, because I know I abandon books more frequently than 1 in every 769 books despite finishing books being a point of pride for me3, implying that the tags are not necessarily unbiased either.

Bayesian correction for flukes. So we have potentially unstable estimates of percentages: we have a lot (n = 1250) of entries, which we know ought to be similar, but with highly noisy estimates as we try to estimate what is a tiny & rare event (readabandoned), which will exaggerate differences & mislead us due to winner’s curse/regression to the mean, particularly when we look at the extremes like top/bottom. This makes it a good fit for Bayesian multilevel modeling: we can treat each book as a random effect, and get shrinkage back to a common mean, reducing the damage done by the sampling error.

From a Bayesian multi-level model, we can then extract reasonably stable proportions, rank, and get out a more meaningful list of books by ‘abandon’ rates. Sounds good to me, and the result should be amusing.

Data

Scraping

No API or CLI, so manual extraction. Despite the GoodReads API (which has since been removed), scraping the data turned out to be a nuisance. The GoodReads API appears to only support exporting your particular data, and not scraping arbitrary tags or lists: it doesn’t even hint at the necessary functionality, and searching didn’t turn up any hints. (Perhaps unsurprisingly given GR’s neglect by Amazon since its acquisition.) The data appears on the web interface in HTML form, so I settled for scraping that. (If I wanted the reviews themselves, I would encounter even more horrifying limitations: GoodReads restricts every reader to seeing a maximum of 300 reviews for a book, no matter how many there actually are—one can see additional sets of 300 by choosing different sorting options, but one can never browse anything close to all of them. This means that a review which falls below the top 300 becomes invisible, and the top reviews become a self-reinforcing echo chamber.)

GR lies to bots.4

At first, I thought I could simply use my usual elinks -dump trick and iterate through the 25 pages GR allows.5 This failed because GR only shows you the other pages when you are logged in; if you are logged out, every page request returns the first page (!) and it’s no good. If there were more pages than 25, I’d look further into exporting cookies from Firefox to elinks or using a TagSoup-like library to parse it, but it’s not worth it for so little.

Instead, I copy-pasted each page’s text by hand, and did Emacs macro & regexp search-and-replaces to turn it into a usable CSV. I kept the provided metadata of author/average-GR-rating (1–5 Likert scale)/publication-year.

Preprocessing

Transforming to normality. Reads/Abandoned are highly right-skewed, as one would expect, and a log-transform helps. Year is tricky, because it ranges from 750BC to 2019, but is so left-skewed to books published in the 20th & especially 21st century that the usual transforms like square/cube-rooting do nothing (which will be a problem if we want to use it as a covariate to look at temporal trends in abandon-rates); I settled for transforming years into percentiles. And we’ll want an Abandon rate in addition to the raw Abandoned count.

Reading the CSV of tag data in & transforming:

gr <- read.csv("https://gwern.net/doc/culture/2019-12-09-goodreads-bookshelf-abandoned.csv",
    colClasses=c("factor", "factor", "integer", "numeric", "integer", "integer"))
## Raw data:
head(gr)
#                                            Title             Author  Abandoned Rating   Reads  Year
# 1                             The Casual Vacancy      J. K. Rowling        763   3.30  288511  2012
# 2                        Catch-22 (Catch-22, #1)      Joseph Heller        685   3.98  679887  1961
# 3              American Gods (American Gods, #1)        Neil Gaiman        663   4.11  693316  2001
# 4 A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1) George R. R. Martin       655   4.45 1833563  1996
# 5                                 The Book Thief       Markus Zusak        608   4.37 1644846  2005
# 6                      Outlander (Outlander, #1)     Diana Gabaldon        572   4.22  744288  1991

## Transforms:
gr$Reads.log <- log(gr$Reads)
gr$Abandoned.log <- log(gr$Abandoned)
perc.rank <- function(x) trunc(rank(x))/length(x)
gr$Year.percentile <- perc.rank(gr$Year)
gr$Abandoned.rate <- gr$Abandoned / gr$Reads
gr$Abandoned.rate.log <- log(gr$Abandoned.rate)

Description

Describing basic statistics:

library(skimr)
skim(gr) ## n = 50 books per page * 25 pages = 1250
# Skim summary statistics
#  n obs: 1250
#  n variables: 11
#
# ── Variable type:factor ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
#  variable missing complete    n n_unique                      top_counts ordered
#    Author       0     1250 1250      835 Ste: 12, Nei: 9, Nea: 8, Chu: 6   FALSE
#     Title       0     1250 1250     1248  Lie: 2, The: 2, 'Su: 1, 10%: 1   FALSE
#
# ── Variable type:integer ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
#   variable missing complete    n      mean        sd   p0      p25      p50       p75    p100     hist
#  Abandoned       0     1250 1250    104.95     84.51   43    53        74      124.75     763 ▇▂▁▁▁▁▁▁
#      Reads       0     1250 1250 264410.29 491210.21 4837 48771.25 108093.5 263805.75 6238667 ▇▁▁▁▁▁▁▁
#       Year       0     1250 1250   1982.6     162.45 -750  1995      2009     2013       2019 ▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▇
#
# ── Variable type:numeric ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
#            variable missing complete    n    mean     sd          p0      p25      p50     p75  p100     hist
#       Abandoned.log       0     1250 1250  4.45   0.58       3.76     3.97     4.3      4.83    6.64 ▇▅▃▂▂▁▁▁
#      Abandoned.rate       0     1250 1250  0.0013 0.0015     1.7e-05  0.00035  0.00079  0.0016  0.02 ▇▁▁▁▁▁▁▁
#  Abandoned.rate.log       0     1250 1250 -7.21   1.09     -10.97    -7.95    -7.14    -6.43   -3.89 ▁▁▃▆▇▅▂▁
#              Rating       0     1250 1250  3.92   0.28       2.69     3.76     3.94     4.11    4.65 ▁▁▁▃▆▇▃▁
#           Reads.log       0     1250 1250 11.66   1.25       8.48    10.79    11.59    12.48   15.65 ▁▃▆▇▆▃▁▁
#     Year.percentile       0     1250 1250  0.5    0.29   8e-04        0.25     0.51     0.72    1    ▇▇▆▇▇▇▆▇
round(digits=2, cor(subset(gr, select=c("Abandoned.log", "Reads.log", "Rating", "Year.percentile", "Abandoned.rate.log"))))
#                    Abandoned.log Reads.log Rating Year.percentile Abandoned.rate.log
# Abandoned.log               1.00
# Reads.log                   0.49      1.00
# Rating                      0.08      0.42   1.00
# Year.percentile            -0.09     -0.36  -0.18            1.00
# Abandoned.rate.log         -0.03     -0.89  -0.44            0.36               1.00

Newer/lower-rated = worse. As expected, read count correlates strongly with abandon count, and also as makes sense, being a more recent book correlates with fewer reads (less time for people to have read it). Abandoned rates mechanically correlate with abandoned/read counts, of course, since it’s derived from them; more interesting is that higher ratings predict much lower abandon rates, and being older also predicts lower abandon rates. The further correlation of average rating with year percentile is interesting, as it suggests more recent books both have worse ratings and are otherwise more likely to be abandoned—you’d think people would avoid new books with lower ratings, but I guess novelty & marketing are enough to convince people to waste their time.

Analysis

Simple Proportions

So the data looks sensible. What do the raw abandon rates look like when we look at the worst (largest) abandon rates?

gr$Rank.raw <- 1:nrow(gr)
gr <- gr[order(gr$Abandoned.rate, decreasing=TRUE),]
gr$Rank.proportion <- 1:nrow(gr)

cor(gr$Rank.raw, gr$Rank.proportion, method = "spearman")
# [1] -0.0406028435

gr[1:30,c(13, 12, 1, 2, 10)]
# Rank.proportion Rank.raw                                               Title                Author Abandoned.rate
#               1      117 Black Leopard, Red Wolf (The Dark Star Trilogy, #1)          Marlon James         0.0204
#               2      482                                         Space Opera Catherynne M. Valente         0.0114
#               3      411                                         Little, Big          John Crowley         0.0106
#               4      256                            The Witches: Salem, 1692          Stacy Schiff         0.0099
#               5      982                                      Tender Morsels         Margo Lanagan         0.0096
#               6      663           Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota, #1)            Ada Palmer         0.0093
#               7     1212                                  The Flame Alphabet            Ben Marcus         0.0091
#               8      592                                       New York 2140  Kim Stanley Robinson         0.0090
#               9      690                                                Hild       Nicola Griffith         0.0085
#              10     1039                                         Gingerbread         Helen Oyeyemi         0.0084
#              11      701                                            Dhalgren      Samuel R. Delany         0.0083
#              12      114                                       Winter's Tale          Mark Helprin         0.0078
#              13      134                   A Brief History of Seven Killings          Marlon James         0.0078
#              14       10                                       Infinite Jest  David Foster Wallace         0.0075
#              15      184                    The Ministry of Utmost Happiness         Arundhati Roy         0.0072
#              16      962                                    Gold Fame Citrus   Claire Vaye Watkins         0.0071
#              17     1007                                          I Am a Cat        Natsume Sōseki         0.0070
#              18      159                                             Milkman            Anna Burns         0.0066
#              19      689                                 Avenue of Mysteries           John Irving         0.0064
#              20      718                          The Years of Rice and Salt  Kim Stanley Robinson         0.0064
#              21      371                                            Zone One      Colson Whitehead         0.0063
#              22      522                      To Rise Again at a Decent Hour         Joshua Ferris         0.0063
#              23      565                                        City on Fire   Garth Risk Hallberg         0.0062
#              24      330                                    Telegraph Avenue        Michael Chabon         0.0061
#              25      576                                It Can’t Happen Here        Sinclair Lewis         0.0061
#              26      568                                The Finkler Question       Howard Jacobson         0.0059
#              27     1128                Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own           Kate Bolick         0.0058
#              28      771      The Grace of Kings (The Dandelion Dynasty, #1)               Ken Liu         0.0058
#              29      645                                           Barkskins          Annie Proulx         0.0057
#              30     1134                       A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing        Eimear McBride         0.0057

The ranking by rate looks completely different from ranking by count: The Casual Vacancy, Catch-22, American Gods, A Game of Thrones6 etc have all vanished and been replaced by an almost disjoint set. (In fact, the two rankings are uncorrelated: ρ = −0.04.)

Proportion rankings look right. These rankings look much more sensible to me as estimates of most-likely-to-be-abandoned: I did in fact abandon Dhalgren in disgust, and while I enjoyed Natsume Sōseki’s satires of post-Meiji Japan & academia in I Am a Cat, I understand why readers might drop it. I’m unfamiliar with Black Leopard, Red Wolf which tops the ranking, but on looking into it further, that makes sense: it is set in Africa & attempts to Africanize American superhero pop culture, has been hailed by the literary press & given awards, somewhat politicized, is over 600 pages long, and even its fans concede that it is difficult to read7. So Black Leopard, Red Wolf topping the ranking may not be flattering, but may be fair.

Bayesian Modeling

Implementing Bayesian correction… However—that brings us back to sampling error. Black Leopard, Red Wolf just came out in 2019 and hardly anyone has read it. In several cases, a member of the top 50 approaches the cut-off for not being in the list at all by having <40 abandon count (eg. Spinster or The Flame Alphabet). Is it really plausible that they have the highest abandon rates? This smacks of the winner’s curse, where measurement error/small noisy datapoints dominate the extremes of an analysis without actually being extreme (just numerous & poorly estimated).

So the next step is Bayesian modeling to account for the uncertainty caused by small n for these most-abandonable books. Using brms, we estimate a simple Bayesian binomial model, with a random effect for a given book’s abandon rate, and add a semi-informative prior expressing our opinion that all books are somewhat similar in abandon rate & there are not wacky huge differences in log odds.

Results:

library(brms)
gbSimple <- brm(Abandoned|trials(Reads) ~ (1|Title), family=binomial,
    prior=c(prior(student_t(3,0,0.5), class="sd", group="Title")), data=gr, chains=30)
gbSimple
# Formula: Abandoned | trials(Reads) ~ (1 | Title)
#    Data: gr (Number of observations: 1250)
# Samples: 30 chains, each with iter = 2000; warmup = 1000; thin = 1;
#          total post-warmup samples = 30000
#
# Group-Level Effects:
# ~Title (Number of levels: 1248)
#               Estimate Est.Error l-95% CI u-95% CI Eff.Sample Rhat
# sd(Intercept)     1.08      0.02     1.04     1.13        751 1.04
#
# Population-Level Effects:
#           Estimate Est.Error l-95% CI u-95% CI Eff.Sample Rhat
# Intercept    -7.21      0.03    -7.27    -7.15        363 1.09
rgbs <- as.data.frame(ranef(gbSimple)$Title)
rgbs <- rgbs[order(rgbs$Estimate.Intercept, decreasing=TRUE),]

## Combine with original GR dataset to examine full rankings at leisure:
rgbs$Title <- rownames(rgbs)
grShrunk <- merge(rgbs, gr, all=TRUE)
grShrunk <- grShrunk[order(grShrunk$Estimate.Intercept, decreasing=TRUE),]
write.csv(grShrunk, row.names=FALSE,
    file="2020-01-05-goodreads-bookshelf-abandoned-posteriorproportions.csv")
## https://gwern.net/doc/culture/2020-01-05-goodreads-bookshelf-abandoned-posteriorproportions.csv
head(rgbs, n=30)
                                                    Estimate.Intercept Est.Error.Intercept Q2.5.Intercept Q97.5.Intercept
# Black Leopard, Red Wolf (The Dark Star Trilogy, #1)         3.32379864        0.0790607148     3.16589591      3.47735486
# Space Opera                                                 2.71627444        0.1112760421     2.49346320      2.92865256
# Little, Big                                                 2.64442569        0.1059941782     2.43214091      2.84849322
# The Witches: Salem, 1692                                    2.58375600        0.0899676079     2.40497914      2.75670092
# Tender Morsels                                              2.52059267        0.1430103435     2.23171890      2.79277487
# Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota, #1)                   2.51037552        0.1248071384     2.26078544      2.74843195
# New York 2140                                               2.47210718        0.1191486878     2.23275007      2.69988279
# The Flame Alphabet                                          2.46184114        0.1554327209     2.15012868      2.75649392
# Hild                                                        2.41661420        0.1280633539     2.15894924      2.66063531
# Dhalgren                                                    2.39653706        0.1279221591     2.14009601      2.64025458
# Gingerbread                                                 2.39249509        0.1477781116     2.09432888      2.67215550
# Winter's Tale                                               2.35943852        0.0792310629     2.20259365      2.51172500
# A Brief History of Seven Killings                           2.34778502        0.0787129413     2.19104704      2.49958076
# Infinite Jest                                               2.31906968        0.0539429921     2.21314673      2.42519239
# The Ministry of Utmost Happiness                            2.27664588        0.0827673701     2.11245754      2.43835817
# Gold Fame Citrus                                            2.23087746        0.1436343235     1.94186387      2.50264489
# I Am a Cat                                                  2.21057738        0.1455388602     1.91550434      2.48521722
# Milkman                                                     2.18260216        0.0814159601     2.01950559      2.33876916
# Avenue of Mysteries                                         2.13978963        0.1272281207     1.88351811      2.38285098
# Zone One                                                    2.13680900        0.1028742023     1.93089374      2.33295611
# The Years of Rice and Salt                                  2.12679705        0.1265444209     1.87263437      2.36955658
# To Rise Again at a Decent Hour                              2.11845577        0.1129727195     1.89144903      2.33461408
# City on Fire                                                2.11101764        0.1169914835     1.87395603      2.33317581
# Telegraph Avenue                                            2.10574358        0.0969163720     1.91411544      2.29259053
# It Can’t Happen Here                                        2.08954687        0.1167404830     1.85544344      2.31284728
# The Finkler Question                                        2.06326071        0.1174026491     1.82910415      2.28826845
# Barkskins                                                   2.02841842        0.1217175555     1.78412138      2.26053102
# The Grace of Kings (The Dandelion Dynasty, #1)              2.02389635        0.1315723831     1.75779024      2.27784518
# Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own                        2.01611353        0.1538652622     1.70673329      2.30803729
# A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing                               2.00585364        0.1538617892     1.69349463      2.29740124
titles <- sapply(gsub(" ", ".", row.names(rgbs)[1:30]),
    function(t) { paste0("r_Title[", t, ",Intercept]") } )
stanplot(gbSimple, pars=titles, exact_match=TRUE) + scale_y_discrete(labels =row.names(rgbs)[1:30]) +
    labs(title="GoodReads book abandon ratings, top 30")
Top 30 GoodReads popular books by abandonment rate (Bayesian posteriors)

Black Leopard, Red Wolf does not enjoy any reprieve here, and to my annoyance, the top ranking changes little from raw proportion to shrunken proportion:

raw <- as.character(gr[order(gr$Abandoned.rate, decreasing=TRUE),]$Title)[1:30]
adjusted <- rownames(rgbs)[1:30]
rawDf <- data.frame(Title=raw, Ranking.raw=1:30)
adjustedDf <- data.frame(Title=adjusted, Ranking.adjusted=1:30)
comparisonDf <- merge(adjustedDf, rawDf, all=TRUE)
comparisonDf$Difference <- comparisonDf$Ranking.raw - comparisonDf$Ranking.adjusted
comparisonDf <- comparisonDf[order(comparisonDf$Ranking.raw),]; comparisonDf
#                                                  Title Ranking.adjusted Ranking.raw Difference
# 5  Black Leopard, Red Wolf (The Dark Star Trilogy, #1)                1           1          0
# 17                                         Space Opera                2           2          0
# 14                                         Little, Big                3           3          0
# 25                            The Witches: Salem, 1692                4           4          0
# 20                                      Tender Morsels                5           5          0
# 28           Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota, #1)                6           6          0
# 22                                  The Flame Alphabet                8           7         -1
# 16                                       New York 2140                7           8          1
# 10                                                Hild                9           9          0
# 8                                          Gingerbread               11          10         -1
# 7                                             Dhalgren               10          11          1
# 29                                       Winter's Tale               12          12          0
# 1                    A Brief History of Seven Killings               13          13          0
# 12                                       Infinite Jest               14          14          0
# 24                    The Ministry of Utmost Happiness               15          15          0
# 9                                     Gold Fame Citrus               16          16          0
# 11                                          I Am a Cat               17          17          0
# 15                                             Milkman               18          18          0
# 3                                  Avenue of Mysteries               19          19          0
# 26                          The Years of Rice and Salt               21          20         -1
# 30                                            Zone One               20          21          1
# 27                      To Rise Again at a Decent Hour               22          22          0
# 6                                         City on Fire               23          23          0
# 19                                    Telegraph Avenue               24          24          0
# 13                                It Can’t Happen Here               25          25          0
# 21                                The Finkler Question               26          26          0
# 18                Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own               29          27         -2
# 23      The Grace of Kings (The Dandelion Dynasty, #1)               28          28          0
# 4                                            Barkskins               27          29          2
# 2                        A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing               30          30          0

…turns out to be unnecessary. Ah well! Apparently the restriction to >40 “abandoned” counts, while unfortunate for many reasons, actually does take care of much of the winner’s-curse bias in looking at raw proportions: the Bayesian model can’t adjust it much based on the available data.

Least Abandoned

Top-30 addictive books. On a more positive note, of the books which are included in the dataset, which 30 have the lowest abandon rates? I find the results entirely plausible8:

grShrunk[1220:1250,c(1, 6)]
#                                                        Title                  Author
#                                              The Kite Runner         Khaled Hosseini
#           The Return of the King (The Lord of the Rings, #3)        J. R. R. Tolkien
#                                      The Old Man and the Sea        Ernest Hemingway
#                                                 The Stranger            Albert Camus
#                       The Da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2)               Dan Brown
#                                                     The Help        Kathryn Stockett
#                            Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3)         Suzanne Collins
#    The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1)            Rick Riordan
#                                         Tuesdays with Morrie             Mitch Albom
#                                     A Thousand Splendid Suns         Khaled Hosseini
#                                      Twilight (Twilight, #1)         Stephenie Meyer
#                    Bridget Jones's Diary (Bridget Jones, #1)          Helen Fielding
#                                             The Great Gatsby     F. Scott Fitzgerald
#                                          Memoirs of a Geisha           Arthur Golden
#                                            The Secret Garden Frances Hodgson Burnett
#                                      The Secret Life of Bees           Sue Monk Kidd
#                                           My Sister's Keeper            Jodi Picoult
#                                       The Fault in Our Stars              John Green
#                                    The Diary of a Young Girl              Anne Frank
#                              The Notebook (The Notebook, #1)         Nicholas Sparks
#                         Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2)         Suzanne Collins
#                                      New Moon (Twilight, #2)         Stephenie Meyer
#                                       Eclipse (Twilight, #3)         Stephenie Meyer
#            To Kill a Mockingbird (To Kill a Mockingbird, #1)              Harper Lee
#                         Angels & Demons (Robert Langdon, #1)               Dan Brown
#                                    The Giver (The Giver, #1)              Lois Lowry
# Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5)           J. K. Rowling
#                      The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1)         Suzanne Collins
#                                                  Animal Farm           George Orwell
#   Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2)           J. K. Rowling
#     Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter, #1)           J. K. Rowling

After all, whatever else you might think of books like The Da Vinci Code or Twilight, they did hook their readers; and before Harry Potter was a movie franchise juggernaut, it was the delight & despair of school/public librarians attempting to cater to suddenly-ravenous children.

Full Rankings

The full n = 1250 posterior proportion rankings in descending order as a table (click to uncollapse):

GoodReads books sorted by Bayesian estimate of probability of being tagged ‘abandoned’ by someone who tries to read them.

Rank

Title

Author

Year

Rating

Abandonment

1

Black Leopard, Red Wolf (The Dark Star Trilogy, #1)

Marlon James

2019

3.49

3.323

2

Space Opera

Catherynne M. Valente

2018

3.50

2.714

3

Little, Big

John Crowley

1981

3.83

2.643

4

The Witches: Salem, 1692

Stacy Schiff

2015

3.17

2.582

5

Tender Morsels

Margo Lanagan

2007

3.56

2.520

6

Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota, #1)

Ada Palmer

2016

3.82

2.508

7

New York 2140

Kim Stanley Robinson

2017

3.55

2.472

8

The Flame Alphabet

Ben Marcus

2012

2.88

2.459

9

Hild

Nicola Griffith

2013

3.78

2.415

10

Dhalgren

Samuel R. Delany

1975

3.78

2.394

11

Gingerbread

Helen Oyeyemi

2019

3.07

2.391

12

Winter’s Tale

Mark Helprin

1983

3.50

2.359

13

A Brief History of Seven Killings

Marlon James

2014

3.87

2.347

14

Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace

1996

4.29

2.317

15

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Arundhati Roy

2017

3.47

2.275

16

Gold Fame Citrus

Claire Vaye Watkins

2015

3.30

2.228

17

I Am a Cat

Natsume Sōseki

1905

3.71

2.208

18

Milkman

Anna Burns

2018

3.60

2.181

19

Avenue of Mysteries

John Irving

2015

3.23

2.139

20

Zone One

Colson Whitehead

2011

3.26

2.135

21

The Years of Rice and Salt

Kim Stanley Robinson

2002

3.73

2.125

22

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

Joshua Ferris

2014

3.08

2.118

23

City on Fire

Garth Risk Hallberg

2015

3.41

2.109

24

Telegraph Avenue

Michael Chabon

2012

3.38

2.104

25

It Can’t Happen Here

Sinclair Lewis

1935

3.76

2.089

26

The Finkler Question

Howard Jacobson

2010

2.78

2.062

27

Barkskins

Annie Proulx

2016

3.77

2.026

28

The Grace of Kings (The Dandelion Dynasty, #1)

Ken Liu

2015

3.73

2.022

29

Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own

Kate Bolick

2015

3.45

2.014

30

A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing

Eimear McBride

2013

3.47

2.003

31

Jane, Unlimited

Kristin Cashore

2017

3.36

1.990

32

Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Madeleine Thien

2016

3.90

1.942

33

The Map of Time

Félix J. Palma

2008

3.38

1.936

34

The Quick

Lauren Owen

2014

3.24

1.922

35

The Queen of the Night

Alexander Chee

2016

3.43

1.912

36

What is Not Yours is Not Yours

Helen Oyeyemi

2016

3.64

1.902

37

Frog Music

Emma Donoghue

2014

3.15

1.897

38

Bridge of Clay

Markus Zusak

2018

3.80

1.890

39

The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers

Maxwell King

2018

4.01

1.875

40

The Prague Cemetery

Umberto Eco

2010

3.43

1.874

41

4 3 2 1

Paul Auster

2017

3.84

1.869

42

The Luminaries

Eleanor Catton

2013

3.72

1.864

43

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Salman Rushdie

2015

3.38

1.853

44

The Children’s Book

A. S. Byatt

2009

3.67

1.848

45

The Unconsoled

Kazuo Ishiguro

1995

3.53

1.827

46

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Charles Yu

2010

3.38

1.819

47

The Golden Notebook

Doris Lessing

1962

3.76

1.816

48

The Gone-Away World

Nick Harkaway

2008

4.12

1.812

49

The Wangs vs. the World

Jade Chang

2016

3.31

1.811

50

The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock

Imogen Hermes Gowar

2018

3.61

1.811

51

Reservoir 13

Jon McGregor

2017

3.59

1.810

52

Bleeding Edge

Thomas Pynchon

2013

3.57

1.800

53

After Alice

Gregory Maguire

2015

2.79

1.797

54

Deathless (Leningrad Diptych, #1)

Catherynne M. Valente

2011

4.01

1.785

55

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

Nancy Isenberg

2016

3.74

1.775

56

2312

Kim Stanley Robinson

2012

3.45

1.771

57

On Such a Full Sea

Chang-rae Lee

2014

3.48

1.766

58

Open City

Teju Cole

2011

3.50

1.754

59

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Eliezer Yudkowsky

2015

4.39

1.754

60

Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

Mervyn Peake

1946

3.91

1.736

61

Kraken

China Miéville

2010

3.60

1.728

62

Moonglow

Michael Chabon

2016

3.81

1.727

63

Wildwood (Wildwood Chronicles, #1)

Colin Meloy

2011

3.65

1.706

64

Gravity’s Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon

1973

4.01

1.698

65

Flat Broke with Two Goats: A Memoir of Appalachia

Jennifer McGaha

2018

3.24

1.695

66

Skippy Dies

Paul Murray

2010

3.72

1.695

67

Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, #1)

Neal Stephenson

2003

3.93

1.693

68

The Sellout

Paul Beatty

2015

3.77

1.683

69

Super Sad True Love Story

Gary Shteyngart

2010

3.45

1.681

70

2666

Roberto Bolaño

2004

4.21

1.680

71

The Secret Chord

Geraldine Brooks

2015

3.58

1.679

72

Swamplandia!

Karen Russell

2011

3.23

1.673

73

Lincoln in the Bardo

George Saunders

2017

3.76

1.670

74

A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

Lucia Berlin

2015

4.18

1.658

75

S.

J. J. Abrams

2013

3.84

1.646

76

Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War

Karen Abbott

2014

3.75

1.641

77

The Empathy Exams

Leslie Jamison

2014

3.64

1.640

78

The Red House

Mark Haddon

2012

2.94

1.636

79

The Pox Party (The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, #1)

M. T. Anderson

2006

3.50

1.635

80

Uncommon Type

Tom Hanks

2017

3.44

1.631

81

Welcome to Night Vale (Welcome to Night Vale, #1)

Joseph Fink

2015

3.84

1.622

82

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (Fairyland, #1)

Catherynne M. Valente

2011

3.96

1.584

83

How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

Jordan Ellenberg

2014

3.96

1.573

84

The Favorite Sister

Jessica Knoll

2018

3.09

1.569

85

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.

Neal Stephenson

2017

3.87

1.551

86

Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977–2002

David Sedaris

2015

3.93

1.549

87

Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell #1)

Hilary Mantel

2009

3.86

1.545

88

The Good Lord Bird

James McBride

2013

3.77

1.542

89

The Savage Detectives

Roberto Bolaño

1998

4.12

1.534

90

Unsheltered

Barbara Kingsolver (Author, Narrator)

2018

3.61

1.527

91

How to Be Both

Ali Smith

2014

3.65

1.518

92

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Thomas Piketty

2013

4.04

1.516

93

NW

Zadie Smith

2012

3.44

1.501

94

The Post-Birthday World

Lionel Shriver

2007

3.54

1.500

95

My Absolute Darling

Gabriel Tallent

2017

3.63

1.496

96

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

Mortimer J. Adler

1940

4.01

1.492

97

A Murder in Time (Kendra Donovan, #1)

Julie McElwain

2016

3.75

1.490

98

The Windup Girl

Paolo Bacigalupi

2009

3.75

1.488

99

The Lonely Polygamist

Brady Udall

2010

3.51

1.484

100

We Are Never Meeting In Real Life

Samantha Irby

2017

3.92

1.479

101

The High Mountains of Portugal

Yann Martel

2016

3.38

1.472

102

The Bees

Laline Paull

2014

3.70

1.469

103

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Steven Pinker

2010

4.18

1.463

104

The People in the Trees

Hanya Yanagihara

2013

3.69

1.458

105

H is for Hawk

Helen Macdonald

2014

3.73

1.458

106

The Flamethrowers

Rachel Kushner

2013

3.48

1.457

107

Then We Came to the End

Joshua Ferris

2007

3.46

1.442

108

The Pale King

David Foster Wallace

2011

3.95

1.438

109

The Buried Giant

Kazuo Ishiguro

2015

3.49

1.434

110

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Douglas R. Hofstadter

1979

4.29

1.432

111

The Peripheral

William Gibson

2014

3.94

1.432

112

The Essex Serpent

Sarah Perry

2016

3.60

1.428

113

The Monstrumologist (The Monstrumologist, #1)

Rick Yancey

2009

3.88

1.421

114

Imagine Me Gone

Adam Haslett

2016

3.69

1.410

115

The Little Paris Bookshop

Nina George

2013

3.50

1.410

116

Idaho

Emily Ruskovich

2017

3.52

1.402

117

Descent

Tim Johnston

2015

3.60

1.397

118

James Potter and the Hall of Elders’ Crossing (James Potter, #1)

G. Norman Lippert

2007

3.77

1.396

119

American War

Omar El Akkad

2017

3.79

1.385

120

The Little Friend

Donna Tartt

2002

3.46

1.381

121

Some Luck (Last Hundred Years: A Family Saga, #1)

Jane Smiley

2014

3.61

1.369

122

Underworld

Don DeLillo

1997

3.92

1.359

123

All the Birds in the Sky

Charlie Jane Anders

2016

3.58

1.354

124

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House

Michael Wolff

2018

3.44

1.351

125

The Water Knife

Paolo Bacigalupi

2015

3.83

1.350

126

Accelerando

Charles Stross

2005

3.88

1.346

127

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Susanna Clarke

2004

3.82

1.341

128

Perdido Street Station (New Crobuzon, #1)

China Miéville

2000

3.97

1.333

129

The Road to Character

David Brooks

2015

3.66

1.327

130

The Zookeeper’s Wife

Diane Ackerman

2007

3.46

1.320

131

Meddling Kids

Edgar Cantero

2017

3.56

1.319

132

The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen

2015

4.00

1.319

133

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

Jane Mayer

2016

4.34

1.317

134

Night Train to Lisbon

Pascal Mercier

2004

3.72

1.307

135

Fates and Furies

Lauren Groff

2015

3.57

1.304

136

Ulysses

James Joyce

1922

3.73

1.304

137

Nexus (Nexus, #1)

Ramez Naam

2012

4.05

1.293

138

John Dies at the End (John Dies at the End, #1)

David Wong

2007

3.90

1.290

139

Warlight

Michael Ondaatje

2018

3.64

1.286

140

Once Upon a River

Diane Setterfield

2018

3.99

1.284

141

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

Michael Chabon

2007

3.71

1.279

142

The Library at Mount Char

Scott Hawkins

2015

4.09

1.279

143

The Casual Vacancy

J. K. Rowling

2012

3.30

1.276

144

Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Karen Russell

2013

3.68

1.275

145

The Satanic Verses

Salman Rushdie

1988

3.71

1.273

146

California

Edan Lepucki

2014

3.23

1.264

147

Snow

Orhan Pamuk

2002

3.58

1.258

148

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World

Peter Wohlleben

2015

4.06

1.256

149

We Are Not Ourselves

Matthew Thomas

2014

3.70

1.253

150

Here I Am

Jonathan Safran Foer

2016

3.64

1.253

151

The Paying Guests

Sarah Waters

2014

3.41

1.241

152

Gilead (Gilead, #1)

Marilynne Robinson

2004

3.85

1.239

153

The Bone Clocks

David Mitchell

2014

3.83

1.233

154

Lab Girl

Hope Jahren

2016

4.02

1.230

155

Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality

Christopher Ryan

2010

4.02

1.226

156

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

2012

4.09

1.225

157

The Overstory

Richard Powers

2018

4.19

1.225

158

The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend

Katarina Bivald

2013

3.55

1.224

159

Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1)

Ann Leckie

2013

3.98

1.219

160

LaRose

Louise Erdrich

2016

3.87

1.217

161

Time and Again (Time, #1)

Jack Finney

1970

3.96

1.211

162

The Almost Moon

Alice Sebold

2007

2.69

1.209

163

The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

Fernando Pessoa

1982

4.46

1.207

164

Hidden Figures

Margot Lee Shetterly

2016

3.97

1.206

165

Seating Arrangements

Maggie Shipstead

2012

3.03

1.205

166

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Anthony Marra

2013

4.13

1.201

167

The City of Brass (The Daevabad Trilogy, #1)

S. A. Chakraborty

2017

4.15

1.198

168

Outline

Rachel Cusk

2014

3.62

1.197

169

In the Unlikely Event

Judy Blume

2015

3.52

1.192

170

Min kamp 1 (Min kamp #1)

Karl Ove Knausgård

2009

4.08

1.189

171

Boneshaker (The Clockwork Century, #1)

Cherie Priest

2009

3.50

1.184

172

My Name Is Red

Orhan Pamuk

1998

3.85

1.184

173

The Gathering

Anne Enright

2007

3.07

1.178

174

The Lacuna

Barbara Kingsolver

2009

3.79

1.178

175

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Claire North

2014

4.04

1.171

176

Going Bovine

Libba Bray

2009

3.65

1.170

177

In One Person

John Irving

2012

3.67

1.170

178

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Muriel Barbery

2006

3.76

1.168

179

Dear Life

Alice Munro

2012

3.75

1.167

180

Challenger Deep

Neal Shusterman

2015

4.14

1.157

181

Swing Time

Zadie Smith

2016

3.56

1.157

182

Less

Andrew Sean Greer

2017

3.71

1.157

183

Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man’s Fundamentals for Delicious Living

Nick Offerman

2013

3.68

1.152

184

Er ist wieder da

Timur Vermes

2012

3.44

1.147

185

Seveneves

Neal Stephenson

2015

3.99

1.144

186

Fleishman Is in Trouble

Taffy Brodesser-Akner

2019

3.77

1.143

187

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Marisha Pessl

2006

3.71

1.140

188

Blackout (All Clear, #1)

Connie Willis

2010

3.83

1.132

189

The Emperor’s Children

Claire Messud

2006

2.95

1.126

190

Arcadia

Lauren Groff

2012

3.67

1.124

191

Tinkers

Paul Harding

2008

3.38

1.122

192

Afterworlds (Afterworlds #1)

Scott Westerfeld

2014

3.73

1.120

193

Tangerine

Christine Mangan

2018

3.21

1.118

194

Pygmy

Chuck Palahniuk

2009

2.97

1.117

195

The Invisible Library (The Invisible Library, #1)

Genevieve Cogman

2015

3.73

1.114

196

Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)

Marcel Proust

1913

4.14

1.108

197

The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain

Bill Bryson

2015

3.71

1.106

198

The Summer Before the War

Helen Simonson

2016

3.78

1.099

199

Sweetbitter

Stephanie Danler

2016

3.28

1.091

200

Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

1992

4.15

1.087

201

House of Leaves

Mark Z. Danielewski

2000

4.10

1.086

202

Possession

A. S. Byatt

1990

3.89

1.079

203

Fear: Trump in the White House

Bob Woodward

2018

3.91

1.078

204

The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

Denise Kiernan

2013

3.68

1.068

205

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Richard Flanagan

2013

4.01

1.066

206

Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1)

Kim Stanley Robinson

1992

3.85

1.054

207

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

Sheri Fink

2013

3.90

1.053

208

An Instance of the Fingerpost

Iain Pears

1997

3.94

1.053

209

My Brilliant Friend (The Neapolitan Novels, #1)

Elena Ferrante

2011

3.94

1.048

210

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

Jordan B. Peterson

2018

3.96

1.040

211

Transcription

Kate Atkinson

2018

3.50

1.034

212

One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories

B. J. Novak

2014

3.67

1.027

213

The Library Book

Susan Orlean

2018

3.95

1.018

214

The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

Stuart Turton

2018

3.92

1.017

215

1Q84

Haruki Murakami

2009

3.92

1.016

216

The Glass Bead Game

Hermann Hesse

1943

4.11

1.011

217

The Book of Strange New Things

Michel Faber

2014

3.66

1.008

218

The Terror

Dan Simmons

2007

4.06

1.008

219

Sea of Poppies (Ibis Trilogy, #1)

Amitav Ghosh

2008

3.95

1.003

220

Blindsight (Firefall, #1)

Peter Watts

2006

4.01

1.002

221

The Valley of Amazement

Amy Tan

2013

3.63

0.997

222

Code Name Verity

Elizabeth E. Wein

2012

4.05

0.997

223

The Slap

Christos Tsiolkas

2008

3.19

0.995

224

The Goblin Emperor (The Goblin Emperor, #1)

Katherine Addison

2014

4.04

0.995

225

Purity

Jonathan Franzen

2015

3.61

0.994

226

Midnight’s Children

Salman Rushdie

1981

3.98

0.990

227

The Mars Room

Rachel Kushner

2018

3.49

0.986

228

Inherent Vice

Thomas Pynchon

2009

3.74

0.983

229

A God in Ruins (Todd Family, #2)

Kate Atkinson

2015

3.94

0.981

230

Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker

Jennifer Chiaverini

2013

3.46

0.975

231

Boy, Snow, Bird

Helen Oyeyemi

2013

3.35

0.972

232

Cryptonomicon

Neal Stephenson

1999

4.25

0.964

233

The Witch Elm

Tana French

2018

3.54

0.963

234

Beauty Queens

Libba Bray

2011

3.62

0.959

235

To Say Nothing of the Dog (Oxford Time Travel, #2)

Connie Willis

1998

4.13

0.957

236

The Design of Everyday Things

Donald A. Norman

1988

4.18

0.956

237

Life After Life (Todd Family, #1)

Kate Atkinson

2013

3.76

0.954

238

The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

Elaine N. Aron

1996

3.87

0.949

239

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

Cormac McCarthy

1985

4.17

0.944

240

Fire & Blood (A Targaryen History, #1)

George R. R. Martin

2018

3.89

0.940

241

The Cat’s Table

Michael Ondaatje

2011

3.60

0.936

242

Embassytown

China Miéville

2011

3.88

0.935

243

Mein Kampf

Adolf Hitler

1925

3.16

0.926

244

Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell

2004

4.01

0.924

245

The Known World

Edward P. Jones

2003

3.83

0.917

246

The Tiger’s Wife

Téa Obreht

2011

3.39

0.911

247

Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

Jenny Lawson

2015

3.92

0.911

248

A Place for Us

Fatima Farheen Mirza

2018

4.15

0.910

249

Pure (Pure, #1)

Julianna Baggott

2012

3.74

0.907

250

The Hero With a Thousand Faces

Joseph Campbell

1949

4.20

0.907

251

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

Mary Beard

2015

4.07

0.905

252

The Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann

1924

4.14

0.903

253

A Tale for the Time Being

Ruth Ozeki

2013

4.00

0.900

254

The Rook (The Checquy Files, #1)

Daniel O’Malley

2012

4.12

0.896

255

Anathem

Neal Stephenson

2008

4.18

0.893

256

Girl Waits with Gun (Kopp Sisters, #1)

Amy Stewart

2015

3.76

0.892

257

The Gene: An Intimate History

Siddhartha Mukherjee

2016

4.37

0.892

258

Today Will Be Different

Maria Semple

2016

3.18

0.892

259

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Jonathan Haidt

2012

4.22

0.888

260

Aftermath (Star Wars: Aftermath, #1)

Chuck Wendig

2015

3.21

0.887

261

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Robert M. Pirsig

1974

3.77

0.884

262

Lily and the Octopus

Steven Rowley

2016

3.71

0.883

263

Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives

Gretchen Rubin

2015

3.84

0.881

264

The Nix

Nathan Hill

2016

4.09

0.879

265

The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)

Lev Grossman

2009

3.51

0.879

266

Hopscotch

Julio Cortázar

1963

4.24

0.876

267

The Waves

Virginia Woolf

1931

4.14

0.874

268

Gardens of the Moon (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #1)

Steven Erikson

1999

3.88

0.872

269

Children of Blood and Bone (Legacy of Orïsha, #1)

Tomi Adeyemi

2018

4.16

0.870

270

The Orphan Master’s Son

Adam Johnson

2012

4.07

0.867

271

Salt: A World History

Mark Kurlansky

2002

3.74

0.867

272

Kushiel’s Dart (Phèdre’s Trilogy, #1)

Jacqueline Carey

2001

4.03

0.863

273

Everyone Brave is Forgiven

Chris Cleave

2016

3.78

0.861

274

The Wolf of Wall Street (The Wolf of Wall Street, #1)

Jordan Belfort

2007

3.71

0.857

275

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

Italo Calvino

1979

4.05

0.856

276

Feed (Newsflesh Trilogy, #1)

Mira Grant

2010

3.85

0.855

277

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

Lawrence Wright

2013

4.04

0.854

278

Why We Broke Up

Daniel Handler

2011

3.48

0.852

279

The Other Einstein

Marie Benedict

2016

3.74

0.852

280

Foucault’s Pendulum

Umberto Eco

1988

3.89

0.851

281

Sweet Tooth

Ian McEwan

2012

3.41

0.848

282

Longbourn

Jo Baker

2013

3.63

0.847

283

A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara

2015

4.30

0.846

284

Dorothy Must Die (Dorothy Must Die, #1)

Danielle Paige

2014

3.83

0.844

285

The Interestings

Meg Wolitzer

2013

3.57

0.844

286

The Dante Club (The Dante Club #1)

Matthew Pearl

2003

3.38

0.831

287

The Clockmaker’s Daughter

Kate Morton

2018

3.73

0.831

288

The Happiness Project

Gretchen Rubin

2009

3.61

0.827

289

The Female Persuasion

Meg Wolitzer

2018

3.60

0.827

290

The Reality Dysfunction (Night’s Dawn, #1)

Peter F. Hamilton

1996

4.14

0.824

291

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

Michael Pollan

2018

4.28

0.821

292

The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss

Edmund de Waal

2009

3.87

0.820

293

Eileen

Ottessa Moshfegh

2015

3.49

0.819

294

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, #1)

Seth Grahame-Smith

2009

3.29

0.817

295

The Marriage Plot

Jeffrey Eugenides

2011

3.44

0.814

296

The World Without Us

Alan Weisman

2007

3.80

0.814

297

The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1)

N. K. Jemisin

2015

4.31

0.813

298

The Shining Girls

Lauren Beukes

2013

3.50

0.812

299

The Passage (The Passage, #1)

Justin Cronin

2010

4.04

0.809

300

Shades of Grey (Shades of Grey, #1)

Jasper Fforde

2009

4.14

0.801

301

The Fireman

Joe Hill

2016

3.89

0.799

302

Flight Behavior

Barbara Kingsolver

2012

3.78

0.798

303

Salvage the Bones

Jesmyn Ward

2011

3.92

0.797

304

Her Body and Other Parties

Carmen Maria Machado

2017

3.91

0.794

305

The Dog Stars

Peter Heller

2012

3.92

0.793

306

Bad Feminist

Roxane Gay

2014

3.94

0.784

307

Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold

Stephen Fry

2017

4.24

0.783

308

And I Darken (The Conqueror’s Saga, #1)

Kiersten White

2016

3.87

0.782

309

The Inheritance of Loss

Kiran Desai

2005

3.42

0.781

310

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Azar Nafisi

2003

3.60

0.781

311

Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1)

Connie Willis

1992

4.03

0.768

312

Master and Commander (Aubrey & Maturin, #1)

Patrick O’Brian

1970

4.10

0.766

313

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

David Mitchell

2010

4.03

0.759

314

A Suitable Boy (A Suitable Boy, #1)

Vikram Seth

1993

4.11

0.749

315

The City & the City

China Miéville

2009

3.91

0.747

316

Death Comes to Pemberley

P. D. James

2011

3.25

0.746

317

Labyrinth (Languedoc, #1)

Kate Mosse

2005

3.57

0.743

318

The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

Sam Kean

2010

3.91

0.737

319

The Bone Season (The Bone Season, #1)

Samantha Shannon

2013

3.76

0.737

320

The Dovekeepers

Alice Hoffman

2011

4.04

0.735

321

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t

Nate Silver

2012

3.98

0.734

322

The Book of Speculation

Erika Swyler

2015

3.60

0.732

323

Housekeeping

Marilynne Robinson

1980

3.82

0.727

324

The Long Earth (The Long Earth, #1)

Terry Pratchett

2012

3.76

0.725

325

Consider Phlebas

Iain M. Banks

1987

3.86

0.724

326

Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

Neil Gaiman

2015

3.93

0.724

327

The Leavers

Lisa Ko

2017

3.87

0.722

328

How to Build a Girl

Caitlin Moran

2014

3.71

0.719

329

Sacré Bleu

Christopher Moore

2012

3.78

0.715

330

Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, #1)

Richard K. Morgan

2002

4.05

0.709

331

The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past #1)

Liu Cixin

2008

4.06

0.704

332

White Teeth

Zadie Smith

2000

3.76

0.700

333

Manhattan Beach

Jennifer Egan

2017

3.62

0.699

334

Naked Lunch

William S. Burroughs

1959

3.46

0.699

335

The Hangman’s Daughter (The Hangman’s Daughter, #1)

Oliver Pötzsch

2008

3.73

0.693

336

Reamde

Neal Stephenson

2011

3.97

0.691

337

On the Jellicoe Road

Melina Marchetta

2006

4.13

0.690

338

Serena

Ron Rash

2008

3.53

0.687

339

A Gentleman in Moscow

Amor Towles

2016

4.36

0.682

340

The Power

Naomi Alderman

2016

3.84

0.682

341

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry

Fredrik Backman

2013

4.05

0.678

342

The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History

Robert M. Edsel

2009

3.76

0.673

343

Finnikin of the Rock (Lumatere Chronicles, #1)

Melina Marchetta

2008

3.91

0.669

344

Authority (Southern Reach, #2)

Jeff VanderMeer

2014

3.51

0.667

345

The End of Your Life Book Club

Will Schwalbe

2012

3.81

0.664

346

The Golem and the Jinni (The Golem and the Jinni, #1)

Helene Wecker

2013

4.11

0.664

347

Rabbit, Run

John Updike

1960

3.58

0.661

348

Present Over Perfect: Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living

Shauna Niequist

2016

3.85

0.660

349

The Crimson Petal and the White

Michel Faber

2002

3.88

0.646

350

The Bear and the Nightingale (Winternight Trilogy, #1)

Katherine Arden

2017

4.12

0.643

351

Lord Foul’s Bane (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, #1)

Stephen R. Donaldson

1977

3.72

0.640

352

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Edwin A. Abbott

1884

3.82

0.639

353

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (Inheritance, #1)

N. K. Jemisin

2010

3.85

0.637

354

A Spool of Blue Thread

Anne Tyler

2015

3.41

0.636

355

Eligible (The Austen Project, #4)

Curtis Sittenfeld

2016

3.61

0.635

356

The Chemist

Stephenie Meyer

2016

3.71

0.634

357

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

2011

4.14

0.632

358

Tenth of December

George Saunders

2013

3.97

0.632

359

The Sword of Shannara (The Original Shannara Trilogy, #1)

Terry Brooks

1977

3.76

0.632

360

Incarceron (Incarceron, #1)

Catherine Fisher

2007

3.64

0.630

361

Metro 2033 (Metro, #1)

Dmitry Glukhovsky

2005

3.99

0.629

362

Tropic of Cancer

Henry Miller

1934

3.68

0.627

363

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

David Foster Wallace

2005

4.24

0.624

364

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

Mary Roach

2013

3.93

0.624

365

The Little Stranger

Sarah Waters

2009

3.54

0.621

366

A Confederacy of Dunces

John Kennedy Toole

1980

3.88

0.614

367

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (The Hundred-Year-Old Man, #1)

Jonas Jonasson

2009

3.83

0.613

368

The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4)

Ursula K. Le Guin

1969

4.06

0.613

369

Shantaram

Gregory David Roberts

2003

4.27

0.613

370

The Idiot

Elif Batuman

2017

3.63

0.606

371

The Idiot

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

1869

4.18

0.606

372

At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Bill Bryson

2010

3.97

0.606

373

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir

Jenny Lawson

2012

3.90

0.601

374

The Heart Goes Last

Margaret Atwood

2015

3.37

0.601

375

The Postmistress

Sarah Blake

2009

3.33

0.595

376

Cleopatra: A Life

Stacy Schiff

2010

3.66

0.594

377

Red Sparrow (Red Sparrow Trilogy, #1)

Jason Matthews

2013

3.95

0.594

378

Etiquette & Espionage (Finishing School, #1)

Gail Carriger

2013

3.81

0.592

379

How to Be a Woman

Caitlin Moran

2011

3.73

0.589

380

The Royal We

Heather Cocks

2015

3.80

0.589

381

The Diviners (The Diviners, #1)

Libba Bray

2012

3.97

0.588

382

The Museum of Extraordinary Things

Alice Hoffman

2014

3.74

0.586

383

The Black Company (The Chronicles of the Black Company, #1)

Glen Cook

1984

3.94

0.583

384

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

Neil deGrasse Tyson

2017

4.10

0.583

385

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers, #1)

Becky Chambers

2014

4.16

0.582

386

The Wedding Date (The Wedding Date, #1)

Jasmine Guillory

2018

3.54

0.581

387

Alexander Hamilton

Ron Chernow

2004

4.23

0.570

388

The Atlantis Gene (The Origin Mystery, #1)

A. G. Riddle

2013

3.72

0.566

389

American Pastoral (The American Trilogy, #1)

Philip Roth

1997

3.92

0.566

390

Truthwitch (The Witchlands, #1)

Susan Dennard

2016

3.89

0.565

391

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

Katherine Boo

2012

3.98

0.564

392

Night Film

Marisha Pessl

2013

3.78

0.564

393

The Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentleman Bastard, #1)

Scott Lynch

2006

4.30

0.563

394

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan

2010

3.66

0.557

395

Suite Française

Irène Némirovsky

2004

3.84

0.555

396

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

Ayana Mathis

2012

3.48

0.554

397

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

Isabel Wilkerson

2010

4.36

0.554

398

The Weird Sisters

Eleanor Brown

2011

3.36

0.553

399

The Aeronaut’s Windlass (The Cinder Spires, #1)

Jim Butcher

2015

4.18

0.549

400

The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next, #1)

Jasper Fforde

2001

3.91

0.542

401

Tigana

Guy Gavriel Kay

1990

4.10

0.542

402

Armada

Ernest Cline

2015

3.52

0.534

403

Red Rising (Red Rising, #1)

Pierce Brown

2014

4.27

0.526

404

The Burgess Boys

Elizabeth Strout

2013

3.57

0.523

405

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Holly Black

2013

3.85

0.522

406

The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking, #1)

Patrick Ness

2008

3.98

0.520

407

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

David Wroblewski

2008

3.62

0.520

408

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Siddhartha Mukherjee

2010

4.31

0.517

409

Geek Love

Katherine Dunn

1989

3.97

0.517

410

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Aimee Bender

2010

3.21

0.515

411

The Leftovers

Tom Perrotta

2011

3.40

0.511

412

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

2007

3.92

0.511

413

Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

1615

3.87

0.508

414

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Dave Eggers

2000

3.68

0.505

415

Damned (Damned, #1)

Chuck Palahniuk

2011

3.38

0.503

416

My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Ottessa Moshfegh

2018

3.67

0.496

417

Sleeping Beauties

Stephen King

2017

3.73

0.492

418

The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen

2001

3.79

0.491

419

The Tin Drum

Günter Grass

1959

3.96

0.490

420

The Girls

Emma Cline

2016

3.47

0.489

421

The Wonder

Emma Donoghue

2016

3.62

0.486

422

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf

1927

3.77

0.482

423

Let the Great World Spin

Colum McCann

2009

3.95

0.475

424

The Heart’s Invisible Furies

John Boyne

2017

4.47

0.472

425

The Orchardist

Amanda Coplin

2012

3.77

0.471

426

Acceptance (Southern Reach, #3)

Jeff VanderMeer

2014

3.57

0.470

427

A Fire Upon the Deep (Zones of Thought, #1)

Vernor Vinge

1992

4.14

0.468

428

The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

Michael A. Singer

2007

4.25

0.467

429

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women

Kate Moore

2017

4.16

0.466

430

Three Men in a Boat (Three Men, #1)

Jerome K. Jerome

1889

3.89

0.464

431

Angle of Repose

Wallace Stegner

1971

4.27

0.463

432

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Michelle Alexander

2010

4.50

0.459

433

The Imperfectionists

Tom Rachman

2010

3.54

0.457

434

What Happened

Hillary Rodham Clinton

2017

3.97

0.456

435

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

Michael Lewis

2016

3.99

0.447

436

A Discovery of Witches (All Souls Trilogy, #1)

Deborah Harkness

2011

4.00

0.445

437

The Gargoyle

Andrew Davidson

2008

3.96

0.440

438

Mad About the Boy (Bridget Jones, #3)

Helen Fielding

2013

3.35

0.440

439

Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop Believing the Lies about Who You Are So You Can Become Who You Were Meant to Be

Rachel Hollis

2018

3.76

0.439

440

Pale Fire

Vladimir Nabokov

1962

4.15

0.433

441

The Girl Who Drank the Moon

Kelly Barnhill

2016

4.18

0.428

442

Splintered (Splintered, #1)

A. G. Howard

2013

3.94

0.425

443

Revelation Space (Revelation Space, #1)

Alastair Reynolds

2000

3.98

0.421

444

Sing, Unburied, Sing

Jesmyn Ward

2017

4.02

0.418

445

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

Alan Bradley

2009

3.81

0.416

446

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Matthew Desmond

2016

4.48

0.415

447

The Immortalists

Chloe Benjamin

2018

3.72

0.414

448

There There

Tommy Orange

2018

3.98

0.412

449

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Díaz

2007

3.90

0.410

450

The Nest

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney

2016

3.42

0.408

451

Carve the Mark (Carve the Mark, #1)

Veronica Roth

2017

3.78

0.404

452

Pandora’s Star

Peter F. Hamilton

2004

4.24

0.404

453

Middlemarch

George Eliot

1871

3.96

0.402

454

Tiger’s Curse (The Tiger Saga, #1)

Colleen Houck

2011

4.06

0.398

455

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

Susan Cain

2012

4.06

0.395

456

The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden

Jonas Jonasson

2013

3.76

0.395

457

Feed

M. T. Anderson

2002

3.54

0.393

458

Leviathan (Leviathan, #1)

Scott Westerfeld

2009

3.91

0.388

459

The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood, #1)

Melissa Albert

2018

3.59

0.387

460

The Crying of Lot 49

Thomas Pynchon

1966

3.69

0.385

461

The Blind Assassin

Margaret Atwood

2000

3.95

0.383

462

We Need to Talk About Kevin

Lionel Shriver

2003

4.07

0.382

463

The Man in the High Castle

Philip K. Dick

1962

3.62

0.376

464

Autobiography of a Yogi

Paramahansa Yogananda

1946

4.23

0.375

465

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Jared Diamond

2004

3.93

0.373

466

Dandelion Wine

Ray Bradbury

1957

4.09

0.371

467

Little Brother (Little Brother, #1)

Cory Doctorow

2008

3.93

0.370

468

The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1–4)

T. H. White

1958

4.08

0.369

469

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, #1)

Robin Sloan

2012

3.75

0.367

470

Orlando

Virginia Woolf

1928

3.87

0.355

471

The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo

Amy Schumer

2016

3.73

0.355

472

On the Road

Jack Kerouac

1957

3.63

0.353

473

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

John le Carré

1974

4.05

0.352

474

Walden

Henry David Thoreau

1854

3.79

0.350

475

Uprooted

Naomi Novik

2015

4.09

0.349

476

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

David Allen

2001

3.99

0.347

477

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Greg McKeown

2011

4.03

0.344

478

The Magus

John Fowles

1965

4.05

0.344

479

Seraphina (Seraphina, #1)

Rachel Hartman

2012

3.96

0.343

480

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

Timothy Egan

2005

4.04

0.338

481

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Cheryl Strayed

2012

4.31

0.336

482

The Historian

Elizabeth Kostova

2005

3.78

0.333

483

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin

Erik Larson

2011

3.83

0.330

484

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Elizabeth Gilbert

2009

3.41

0.326

485

On Beauty

Zadie Smith

2005

3.72

0.324

486

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

Oliver Sacks

2007

3.91

0.322

487

The Signature of All Things

Elizabeth Gilbert

2013

3.84

0.317

488

Prince of Thorns (The Broken Empire, #1)

Mark Lawrence

2011

3.86

0.317

489

The Kiss Quotient (The Kiss Quotient, #1)

Helen Hoang

2018

3.90

0.316

490

Partials (Partials Sequence, #1)

Dan Wells

2012

3.94

0.312

491

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing

Marie Kondō

2011

3.83

0.311

492

Catch-22 (Catch-22, #1)

Joseph Heller

1961

3.98

0.310

493

NOS4A2

Joe Hill

2013

4.07

0.310

494

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

James W. Loewen

1995

3.97

0.309

495

Everything Is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer

2002

3.90

0.307

496

The Women in the Castle

Jessica Shattuck

2017

3.86

0.307

497

Someday, Someday, Maybe

Lauren Graham

2013

3.51

0.306

498

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Chabon

2000

4.18

0.305

499

Dad Is Fat

Jim Gaffigan

2013

3.78

0.304

500

Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

Brené Brown

2012

4.27

0.304

501

The Dark Forest (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #2)

Liu Cixin

2008

4.41

0.302

502

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

David Grann

2017

4.09

0.301

503

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

Erik Larson

2015

4.08

0.299

504

Next Year in Havana

Chanel Cleeton

2018

3.95

0.299

505

A Darker Shade of Magic (Shades of Magic, #1)

V. E. Schwab (pseudonym)

2015

4.09

0.298

506

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius

180

4.23

0.297

507

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, #1)

Hank Green

2018

4.03

0.294

508

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

Dee Brown

1970

4.23

0.294

509

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

D. H. Lawrence

1928

3.50

0.290

510

You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life

Jen Sincero

2013

3.96

0.290

511

How to Stop Time

Matt Haig

2017

3.85

0.287

512

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

Mary Roach

2008

3.84

0.285

513

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Friedrich Nietzsche

1883

4.06

0.283

514

March

Geraldine Brooks

2005

3.75

0.278

515

Falling Kingdoms (Falling Kingdoms, #1)

Morgan Rhodes

2012

3.80

0.272

516

This Side of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald

1920

3.67

0.267

517

Strange the Dreamer (Strange the Dreamer, #1)

Laini Taylor

2017

4.33

0.267

518

The New York Trilogy

Paul Auster

1987

3.89

0.261

519

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

Christopher Moore

2002

4.25

0.261

520

The Book of Lost Things

John Connolly

2006

3.98

0.260

521

Modern Romance

Aziz Ansari

2015

3.83

0.260

522

The Dragonbone Chair (Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, #1)

Tad Williams

1988

3.95

0.259

523

American Gods (American Gods, #1)

Neil Gaiman

2001

4.11

0.258

524

Freedom

Jonathan Franzen

2010

3.75

0.254

525

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Tom Robbins

1976

3.76

0.250

526

Artemis

Andy Weir

2017

3.67

0.247

527

Stories of Your Life and Others

Ted Chiang

2002

4.26

0.242

528

Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1)

William Gibson

1984

3.89

0.240

529

Beautiful Ruins

Jess Walter

2012

3.68

0.235

530

Something Wicked This Way Comes (Green Town, #2)

Ray Bradbury

1962

3.94

0.232

531

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

Joshua Foer

2011

3.87

0.229

532

Crazy Rich Asians (Crazy Rich Asians, #1)

Kevin Kwan

2013

3.84

0.227

533

A Canticle for Leibowitz (St. Leibowitz, #1)

Walter M. Miller Junior

1959

3.98

0.226

534

Year One (Chronicles of The One, #1)

Nora Roberts

2017

4.04

0.224

535

Sophie’s World

Jostein Gaarder

1991

3.92

0.223

536

Bring Up the Bodies (Thomas Cromwell, #2)

Hilary Mantel

2012

4.28

0.222

537

Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf

1925

3.79

0.217

538

The Red and the Black

Stendhal

1830

3.87

0.216

539

Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone

Brené Brown

2017

4.16

0.215

540

The Rules of Magic (Practical Magic, #0)

Alice Hoffman

2017

3.96

0.215

541

Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand

1957

3.69

0.215

542

Spinning Silver

Naomi Novik

2018

4.25

0.211

543

Villette

Charlotte Brontë

1853

3.76

0.210

544

The One & Only

Emily Giffin

2014

3.15

0.209

545

The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt

2013

3.91

0.207

546

The Circle

Dave Eggers

2013

3.43

0.205

547

The Distant Hours

Kate Morton

2010

3.88

0.204

548

Britt-Marie Was Here

Fredrik Backman

2014

4.07

0.203

549

The Queen of the Tearling (The Queen of the Tearling, #1)

Erika Johansen

2014

4.01

0.201

550

The Liars’ Club

Mary Karr

1995

3.93

0.200

551

The Dispossessed

Ursula K. Le Guin

1974

4.21

0.193

552

Blood Red Road (Dust Lands, #1)

Moira Young

2011

3.92

0.190

553

Beartown (Beartown, #1)

Fredrik Backman

2016

4.26

0.190

554

The Sparrow (The Sparrow, #1)

Mary Doria Russell

1996

4.16

0.190

555

You (You, #1)

Caroline Kepnes

2014

3.90

0.190

556

The Master and Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov

1967

4.30

0.188

557

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

Ed Catmull

2009

4.20

0.184

558

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers

1940

3.98

0.182

559

Saturday

Ian McEwan

2005

3.63

0.181

560

The Mists of Avalon (Avalon, #1)

Marion Zimmer Bradley

1982

4.12

0.177

561

Blindness

José Saramago

1995

4.11

0.177

562

Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

Reza Aslan

2013

3.84

0.175

563

Sleeping Giants (Themis Files, #1)

Sylvain Neuvel

2016

3.84

0.170

564

The Guns of August

Barbara W. Tuchman

1962

4.18

0.170

565

Go Set a Watchman (To Kill a Mockingbird, #2)

Harper Lee

2015

3.31

0.165

566

A Spark of Light

Jodi Picoult

2018

3.68

0.163

567

The 48 Laws of Power

Robert Greene

1998

4.18

0.163

568

The Hour I First Believed

Wally Lamb

2007

3.81

0.161

569

The Paper Magician

Charlie N. Holmberg

2014

3.65

0.152

570

The Girl With All the Gifts (The Girl With All the Gifts, #1)

M. R. Carey

2014

3.94

0.152

571

Heart-Shaped Box

Joe Hill

2007

3.83

0.151

572

Illuminae (The Illuminae Files, #1)

Amie Kaufman

2015

4.30

0.151

573

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Haruki Murakami

1994

4.17

0.151

574

The Portrait of a Lady

Henry James

1881

3.77

0.150

575

Three Dark Crowns (Three Dark Crowns, #1)

Kendare Blake

2016

3.86

0.148

576

The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer

Neal Stephenson

1995

4.19

0.144

577

The Jane Austen Book Club

Karen Joy Fowler

2004

3.08

0.140

578

Haunted

Chuck Palahniuk

2005

3.59

0.137

579

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Carol S. Dweck

2006

4.07

0.133

580

Tender Is the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald

1934

3.82

0.132

581

The Sisters Brothers

Patrick deWitt

2011

3.85

0.129

582

The Blade Itself (The First Law, #1)

Joe Abercrombie

2006

4.16

0.127

583

The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy

1997

3.93

0.125

584

Notes from a Small Island

Bill Bryson

1995

3.92

0.124

585

The Secret History

Donna Tartt

1992

4.09

0.118

586

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Barbara Kingsolver

2007

4.04

0.114

587

Burial Rites

Hannah Kent

2013

4.03

0.114

588

This Is How You Lose Her

Junot Díaz

2010

3.75

0.113

589

The Silmarillion (Middle-Earth Universe)

J. R. R. Tolkien

1977

3.92

0.111

590

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Charles C. Mann

2005

4.02

0.106

591

Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

Neil Gaiman

2006

4.00

0.105

592

The Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead

2016

4.02

0.105

593

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes, #1)

Laurie R. King

1994

4.07

0.104

594

The Slow Regard of Silent Things (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #2.5)

Patrick Rothfuss

2014

3.91

0.103

595

The Forest of Hands and Teeth (The Forest of Hands and Teeth, #1)

Carrie Ryan

2009

3.59

0.099

596

The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

1879

4.32

0.099

597

Heartless

Marissa Meyer

2016

4.05

0.098

598

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Jared Diamond

1997

4.03

0.098

599

The Japanese Lover

Isabel Allende

2015

3.81

0.096

600

The History of Love

Nicole Krauss

2005

3.92

0.091

601

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García Márquez

1967

4.06

0.087

602

Her Fearful Symmetry

Audrey Niffenegger

2009

3.24

0.087

603

The Rosie Effect (Don Tillman, #2)

Graeme Simsion

2014

3.59

0.085

604

The Vegetarian

Han Kang

2007

3.58

0.082

605

Soulless (Parasol Protectorate, #1)

Gail Carriger

2009

3.91

0.082

606

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

David Grann

2009

3.87

0.081

607

10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works

Dan Harris

2014

3.92

0.080

608

Circe

Madeline Miller

2018

4.28

0.080

609

Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak

1957

4.03

0.078

610

City of Girls

Elizabeth Gilbert

2019

4.07

0.077

611

Vanity Fair

William Makepeace Thackeray

1847

3.78

0.076

612

Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1)

Margaret Atwood

2003

4.01

0.073

613

The Scorpio Races

Maggie Stiefvater

2011

4.09

0.073

614

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce

1916

3.61

0.073

615

Snow Crash

Neal Stephenson

1992

4.03

0.072

616

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (The Wicked Years, #1)

Gregory Maguire

1995

3.53

0.070

617

The Sound and the Fury

William Faulkner

1929

3.86

0.069

618

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Karen Joy Fowler

2013

3.72

0.067

619

Commonwealth

Ann Patchett

2016

3.81

0.067

620

Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s Learned

Lena Dunham

2014

3.30

0.067

621

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Anne Lamott

1994

4.24

0.066

622

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, #1)

Seth Grahame-Smith

2010

3.70

0.064

623

Maisie Dobbs (Maisie Dobbs, #1)

Jacqueline Winspear

2003

3.91

0.062

624

The God Delusion

Richard Dawkins

2006

3.90

0.059

625

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Michael Pollan

2006

4.18

0.057

626

The Thief (The Queen’s Thief, #1)

Megan Whalen Turner

1996

3.88

0.057

627

Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

Yuval Noah Harari

2015

4.27

0.055

628

Love Letters to the Dead

Ava Dellaira

2014

3.81

0.055

629

The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

Eckhart Tolle

1997

4.13

0.053

630

Practical Magic (Practical Magic #1)

Alice Hoffman

1995

3.78

0.051

631

Caleb’s Crossing

Geraldine Brooks

2011

3.82

0.050

632

Luckiest Girl Alive

Jessica Knoll

2015

3.49

0.048

633

Bleak House

Charles Dickens

1853

4.01

0.047

634

The Name of the Rose

Umberto Eco

1980

4.12

0.046

635

The Divine Comedy

Dante Alighieri

1320

4.07

0.042

636

Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

2006

4.31

0.042

637

The Night Circus

Erin Morgenstern

2011

4.04

0.042

638

Outlander (Outlander, #1)

Diana Gabaldon

1991

4.22

0.040

639

Into the Water

Paula Hawkins

2017

3.56

0.036

640

The Magician King (The Magicians, #2)

Lev Grossman

2011

3.92

0.034

641

Moby-Dick, or, the Whale

Herman Melville

1851

3.49

0.025

642

White Noise

Don DeLillo

1985

3.86

0.023

643

Lisey’s Story

Stephen King

2006

3.67

0.022

644

A Reliable Wife

Robert Goolrick

2009

3.26

0.022

645

What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

Malcolm Gladwell

2009

3.85

0.016

646

The President Is Missing

Bill Clinton

2018

3.83

0.015

647

Eating Animals

Jonathan Safran Foer

2009

4.20

0.015

648

A People’s History of the United States

Howard Zinn

1980

4.08

0.014

649

All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

Cormac McCarthy

1992

3.99

0.013

650

The Alchemyst (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, #1)

Michael Scott

2007

3.84

0.012

651

What Is the What

Dave Eggers

2006

4.16

0.012

652

The Mysterious Benedict Society (The Mysterious Benedict Society, #1)

Trenton Lee Stewart

2007

4.16

0.012

653

The Song of Achilles

Madeline Miller

2011

4.33

0.004

654

Rivers of London (Peter Grant, #1)

Ben Aaronovitch

2011

3.91

−0.002

655

War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy

1867

4.11

−0.005

656

The Black Prism (Lightbringer, #1)

Brent Weeks

2010

4.24

−0.006

657

Olive Kitteridge (Olive Kitteridge, #1)

Elizabeth Strout

2008

3.82

−0.010

658

The Round House

Louise Erdrich

2012

3.93

−0.013

659

The Girl of Fire and Thorns (Fire and Thorns, #1)

Rae Carson

2011

3.79

−0.014

660

Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Elizabeth Gilbert

2015

3.92

−0.017

661

Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi

2016

4.42

−0.018

662

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson

2003

4.21

−0.018

663

Americanah

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

2013

4.30

−0.020

664

The Shadow of the Wind (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #1)

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

2001

4.26

−0.021

665

Alias Grace

Margaret Atwood

1996

4.03

−0.022

666

The Dinner

Herman Koch

2009

3.22

−0.022

667

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

Michelle McNamara

2018

4.15

−0.023

668

The Artist’s Way

Julia Cameron

1992

3.91

−0.025

669

Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1)

Dan Simmons

1989

4.24

−0.025

670

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

Oliver Sacks

1985

4.06

−0.026

671

The Miniaturist

Jessie Burton

2014

3.59

−0.027

672

First Grave on the Right (Charley Davidson, #1)

Darynda Jones

2011

4.05

−0.027

673

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

Erik Larson

2003

3.99

−0.030

674

We

Yevgeny Zamyatin

1921

3.94

−0.031

675

A Prayer for Owen Meany

John Irving

1989

4.23

−0.032

676

Wool Omnibus (Silo, #1)

Hugh Howey

2012

4.23

−0.032

677

The Alienist (Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, #1)

Caleb Carr

1994

4.06

−0.032

678

The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje

1992

3.88

−0.037

679

Gone (Gone, #1)

Michael Grant

2008

3.86

−0.041

680

American Psycho

Bret Easton Ellis

1991

3.82

−0.044

681

A Passage to India

E. M. Forster

1924

3.68

−0.046

682

I Am Pilgrim

Terry Hayes

2013

4.24

−0.054

683

Grave Mercy (His Fair Assassin, #1)

Robin LaFevers

2012

3.90

−0.058

684

Jitterbug Perfume

Tom Robbins

1984

4.25

−0.060

685

The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue (Montague Siblings, #1)

Mackenzi Lee

2017

4.14

−0.060

686

Love in the Time of Cholera

Gabriel García Márquez

1985

3.91

−0.061

687

The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion

2005

3.89

−0.061

688

Exit West

Mohsin Hamid

2017

3.79

−0.065

689

Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls

David Sedaris

2013

3.82

−0.065

690

Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)

Jeff VanderMeer

2014

3.68

−0.069

691

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari

2011

4.44

−0.070

692

At the Water’s Edge

Sara Gruen

2015

3.66

−0.071

693

Shadow of Night (All Souls Trilogy, #2)

Deborah Harkness

2012

4.06

−0.078

694

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand

Helen Simonson

2010

3.89

−0.092

695

The Keeper of Lost Things

Ruth Hogan

2017

3.82

−0.096

696

Landline

Rainbow Rowell

2014

3.55

−0.097

697

Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel

2014

4.03

−0.099

698

Cutting for Stone

Abraham Verghese

2009

4.29

−0.102

699

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

Randall Munroe

2014

4.16

−0.107

700

Truly Madly Guilty

Liane Moriarty

2016

3.57

−0.111

701

Hounded (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #1)

Kevin Hearne

2011

4.11

−0.111

702

_The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life_

Mark Manson

2016

3.97

−0.115

703

Flaggermusmannen (Harry Hole, #1)

Jo Nesbø

1997

3.54

−0.117

704

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Mary Roach

2003

4.06

−0.119

705

Before the Fall

Noah Hawley

2016

3.73

−0.122

706

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

J. D. Vance

2016

3.93

−0.122

707

The Strain (The Strain Trilogy, #1)

Guillermo del Toro

2009

3.78

−0.122

708

Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

1877

4.04

−0.124

709

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

Jon Krakauer

2003

4.00

−0.126

710

I Capture the Castle

Dodie Smith

1948

4.00

−0.127

711

The Origin of Species

Charles Darwin

1859

3.98

−0.132

712

People of the Book

Geraldine Brooks

2008

4.02

−0.136

713

Loving Frank

Nancy Horan

2007

3.75

−0.137

714

Lilac Girls (Lilac Girls, #1)

Martha Hall Kelly

2016

4.29

−0.140

715

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

Max Brooks

2006

4.01

−0.142

716

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

Terry Pratchett

1990

4.25

−0.142

717

The Raven Boys (The Raven Cycle, #1)

Maggie Stiefvater

2012

4.06

−0.143

718

The Shipping News

Annie Proulx

1993

3.86

−0.144

719

Stranger in a Strange Land

Robert A. Heinlein

1961

3.92

−0.145

720

The Young Elites (The Young Elites, #1)

Marie Lu

2014

3.90

−0.145

721

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov

1955

3.89

−0.161

722

The Girl in the Spider’s Web (Millennium, #4)

David Lagercrantz

2015

3.76

−0.165

723

The Twelve (The Passage, #2)

Justin Cronin

2012

4.00

−0.167

724

Bel Canto

Ann Patchett

2001

3.93

−0.168

725

The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches, #1)

Anne Rice

1990

4.11

−0.168

726

The 4-Hour Workweek

Timothy Ferriss

2007

3.87

−0.169

727

La Vérité sur l’affaire Harry Quebert

Joël Dicker

2012

4.03

−0.170

728

The Paris Wife

Paula McLain

2011

3.81

−0.172

729

Life

Keith Richards

2010

3.86

−0.173

730

The Snow Child

Eowyn Ivey

2012

3.97

−0.174

731

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Christopher Hitchens

2007

3.97

−0.175

732

Carry On (Simon Snow, #1)

Rainbow Rowell

2015

4.24

−0.175

733

A Scanner Darkly

Philip K. Dick

1977

4.02

−0.180

734

The Lake House

Kate Morton

2015

4.05

−0.186

735

Vicious (Villains, #1)

V. E. Schwab

2013

4.24

−0.187

736

Peace Like a River

Leif Enger

2001

4.00

−0.189

737

Nausea

Jean-Paul Sartre

1938

3.92

−0.191

738

Revolutionary Road

Richard Yates

1961

3.91

−0.193

739

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Robert A. Heinlein

1966

4.17

−0.193

740

The Kiss of Deception (The Remnant Chronicles, #1)

Mary E. Pearson

2014

4.02

−0.193

741

Ishmael

Daniel Quinn

1992

3.99

−0.199

742

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Jonathan Safran Foer

2005

3.98

−0.199

743

A Great and Terrible Beauty (Gemma Doyle #1)

Libba Bray

2003

3.79

−0.201

744

The Turn of the Screw

Henry James

1898

3.43

−0.208

745

The Wishing Spell (The Land of Stories, #1)

Chris Colfer

2012

4.23

−0.209

746

Furies of Calderon (Codex Alera, #1)

Jim Butcher

2004

4.12

−0.210

747

As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner

1930

3.71

−0.211

748

The Gifts of Imperfection

Brené Brown

2010

4.21

−0.212

749

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Haruki Murakami

1985

4.15

−0.213

750

The Wrath and the Dawn (The Wrath and the Dawn, #1)

Renée Ahdieh

2015

4.15

−0.214

751

Horns

Joe Hill

2009

3.92

−0.214

752

The Cuckoo’s Calling (Cormoran Strike, #1)

Robert Galbraith (Pseudonym)

2013

3.86

−0.216

753

The Art of Fielding

Chad Harbach

2011

3.99

−0.221

754

Small Great Things

Jodi Picoult

2016

4.34

−0.224

755

Glass Sword (Red Queen, #2)

Victoria Aveyard

2016

3.91

−0.227

756

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Harold Fry, #1)

Rachel Joyce

2012

3.91

−0.231

757

Case Histories (Jackson Brodie #1)

Kate Atkinson

2004

3.83

−0.240

758

Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert

1856

3.66

−0.241

759

Corelli’s Mandolin

Louis de Bernières

1994

3.98

−0.243

760

Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison

1952

3.86

−0.245

761

Under the Dome

Stephen King

2009

3.90

−0.249

762

My Name Is Lucy Barton

Elizabeth Strout

2016

3.51

−0.249

763

The Death of Mrs. Westaway

Ruth Ware

2018

3.81

−0.257

764

Magic Bites (Kate Daniels, #1)

Ilona Andrews

2007

4.07

−0.260

765

Paradise Lost

John Milton

1667

3.81

−0.267

766

The House of Mirth

Edith Wharton

1905

3.95

−0.270

767

Neverwhere (London Below, #1)

Neil Gaiman

1996

4.17

−0.271

768

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

Simon Winchester

1998

3.84

−0.272

769

Orange Is the New Black

Piper Kerman

2010

3.71

−0.272

770

Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1)

Leigh Bardugo

2015

4.46

−0.276

771

We Were the Mulvaneys

Joyce Carol Oates

1996

3.72

−0.277

772

The Selfish Gene

Richard Dawkins

1976

4.13

−0.278

773

Nine Perfect Strangers

Liane Moriarty

2018

3.50

−0.280

774

Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #1)

Louise Penny

2005

3.88

−0.285

775

The Trial

Franz Kafka

1925

3.97

−0.289

776

Norse Mythology

Neil Gaiman

2017

4.09

−0.292

777

Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse, #1)

James S. A. Corey

2011

4.25

−0.294

778

The Woman in White

Wilkie Collins

1859

3.99

−0.295

779

Across the Universe (Across the Universe, #1)

Beth Revis

2011

3.77

−0.296

780

The Darkest Minds (The Darkest Minds, #1)

Alexandra Bracken

2012

4.20

−0.298

781

Dead Witch Walking (The Hollows, #1)

Kim Harrison

2004

4.04

−0.301

782

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

Thomas L. Friedman

2005

3.68

−0.303

783

Ringworld (Ringworld, #1)

Larry Niven

1970

3.96

−0.305

784

The Age of Miracles

Karen Thompson Walker

2012

3.65

−0.308

785

The Last of the Mohicans (The Leatherstocking Tales #2)

James Fenimore Cooper

1826

3.70

−0.310

786

Sabriel (Abhorsen, #1)

Garth Nix

1995

4.17

−0.312

787

Let the Right One In

John Ajvide Lindqvist

2004

4.06

−0.313

788

Normal People

Sally Rooney

2018

3.89

−0.313

789

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Mark Twain

1889

3.77

−0.319

790

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

Simon Sinek

2009

4.07

−0.320

791

Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a Time

Greg Mortenson

2006

3.65

−0.321

792

The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam, #2)

Margaret Atwood

2009

4.07

−0.325

793

American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History

Chris Kyle

2012

4.00

−0.326

794

Bitten (Otherworld, #1)

Kelley Armstrong

2001

4.05

−0.330

795

Brideshead Revisited

Evelyn Waugh

1945

4.00

−0.332

796

A Man Called Ove

Fredrik Backman

2012

4.36

−0.333

797

Call Me By Your Name (Call Me By Your Name, #1)

André Aciman

2007

4.27

−0.336

798

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates

2015

4.40

−0.342

799

Shiver (The Wolves of Mercy Falls, #1)

Maggie Stiefvater

2009

3.77

−0.348

800

Tell the Wolves I’m Home

Carol Rifka Brunt

2012

4.04

−0.348

801

The 5th Wave (The 5th Wave, #1)

Rick Yancey

2013

4.06

−0.353

802

Shatter Me (Shatter Me, #1)

Tahereh Mafi

2011

3.97

−0.356

803

Far From the Madding Crowd

Thomas Hardy

1874

3.94

−0.358

804

The Color of Magic (Discworld, #1; Rincewind, #1)

Terry Pratchett

1983

3.99

−0.367

805

11/22/63

Stephen King

2011

4.31

−0.368

806

Pachinko

Min Jin Lee

2017

4.26

−0.369

807

A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper, #1)

Christopher Moore

2006

4.07

−0.372

808

Daughter of Smoke & Bone (Daughter of Smoke & Bone, #1)

Laini Taylor

2011

4.03

−0.373

809

Magyk (Septimus Heap, #1)

Angie Sage

2005

3.82

−0.378

810

The Last Wish (The Witcher, #0.5)

Andrzej Sapkowski

1993

4.19

−0.379

811

The Way of Shadows (Night Angel, #1)

Brent Weeks

2008

4.15

−0.380

812

Caraval (Caraval, #1)

Stephanie Garber

2017

3.95

−0.383

813

The Winner’s Curse (The Winner’s Trilogy, #1)

Marie Rutkoski

2014

4.00

−0.385

814

The Alice Network

Kate Quinn

2017

4.26

−0.392

815

Yes Please

Amy Poehler

2014

3.82

−0.393

816

An American Marriage

Tayari Jones

2018

3.97

−0.394

817

The Pillars of the Earth (Kingsbridge, #1)

Ken Follett

1989

4.31

−0.394

818

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera

1984

4.10

−0.399

819

Since You’ve Been Gone

Morgan Matson

2014

4.14

−0.401

820

The Secret Keeper

Kate Morton

2012

4.14

−0.401

821

Atonement

Ian McEwan

2001

3.90

−0.402

822

Dragonfly in Amber (Outlander, #2)

Diana Gabaldon

1992

4.32

−0.402

823

The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #1)

Patrick Rothfuss

2007

4.54

−0.406

824

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Jesse Andrews

2012

3.56

−0.408

825

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

Lynne Truss

2003

3.87

−0.408

826

An Abundance of Katherines

John Green

2006

3.59

−0.410

827

Anna Dressed in Blood (Anna, #1)

Kendare Blake

2011

3.94

−0.412

828

‘Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!’: Adventures of a Curious Character

Richard P. Feynman

1985

4.28

−0.417

829

Daisy Jones & The Six

Taylor Jenkins Reid

2019

4.22

−0.423

830

Steppenwolf

Hermann Hesse

1927

4.12

−0.437

831

Under the Never Sky (Under the Never Sky, #1)

Veronica Rossi

2011

4.00

−0.438

832

The Eye of the World (The Wheel of Time, #1)

Robert Jordan

1990

4.19

−0.440

833

All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr

2014

4.33

−0.441

834

One Day

David Nicholls

2009

3.78

−0.443

835

Dubliners

James Joyce

1914

3.85

−0.446

836

The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton

1920

3.94

−0.450

837

Three Wishes

Liane Moriarty

2003

3.78

−0.452

838

The Plague

Albert Camus

1947

3.98

−0.459

839

The House at Riverton

Kate Morton

2006

3.95

−0.461

840

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro

2005

3.82

−0.461

841

The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro

1989

4.12

−0.462

842

One Day in December

Josie Silver

2018

4.00

−0.463

843

The Angel’s Game (El cementerio de los libros olvidados #2)

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

2008

3.91

−0.465

844

The Kill Order (The Maze Runner, #0.5)

James Dashner

2012

3.72

−0.465

845

A Fine Balance

Rohinton Mistry

1995

4.36

−0.467

846

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

Daniel James Brown

2013

4.35

−0.475

847

Gulliver’s Travels

Jonathan Swift

1726

3.56

−0.476

848

The Iron King (The Iron Fey, #1)

Julie Kagawa

2010

3.91

−0.479

849

Moloka’i (Moloka’i #1)

Alan Brennert

2003

4.17

−0.482

850

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

Michael Pollan

2008

4.08

−0.488

851

Rules of Civility

Amor Towles

2011

4.04

−0.498

852

Attachments

Rainbow Rowell

2011

3.92

−0.504

853

Beautiful Darkness (Caster Chronicles, #2)

Kami Garcia

2010

3.84

−0.507

854

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

Sheryl Sandberg

2013

3.95

−0.508

855

The Shack

William Paul Young

2007

3.76

−0.509

856

Life As We Knew It (Last Survivors, #1)

Susan Beth Pfeffer

2006

3.89

−0.514

857

The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe, #1)

Raymond Chandler

1939

4.01

−0.516

858

The Thirteenth Tale

Diane Setterfield

2006

3.96

−0.516

859

Dark Matter

Blake Crouch

2016

4.10

−0.517

860

I Am the Messenger

Markus Zusak

2002

4.07

−0.521

861

Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen

Julie Powell

2005

3.70

−0.521

862

Crossed (Matched, #2)

Ally Condie

2011

3.52

−0.525

863

The Likeness (Dublin Murder Squad, #2)

Tana French

2008

4.06

−0.525

864

Watership Down (Watership Down, #1)

Richard Adams

1972

4.05

−0.525

865

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

Christopher McDougall

2009

4.29

−0.526

866

The Jungle

Upton Sinclair

1906

3.74

−0.527

867

Hollow City (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, #2)

Ransom Riggs

2014

4.07

−0.530

868

One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd (One Thousand White Women, #1)

Jim Fergus

1998

3.88

−0.532

869

The White Tiger

Aravind Adiga

2008

3.73

−0.541

870

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Extraordinary Voyages, #6)

Jules Verne

1869

3.88

−0.541

871

The Light Between Oceans

M. L. Stedman

2012

4.02

−0.544

872

State of Wonder

Ann Patchett

2011

3.87

−0.546

873

Beloved

Toni Morrison

1987

3.82

−0.552

874

Days of Blood & Starlight (Daughter of Smoke & Bone, #2)

Laini Taylor

2012

4.18

−0.555

875

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

Charles Duhigg

2012

4.09

−0.556

876

Unwind (Unwind, #1)

Neal Shusterman

2007

4.18

−0.561

877

The Way of Kings (The Stormlight Archive, #1)

Brandon Sanderson

2010

4.65

−0.561

878

In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1)

Tana French

2007

3.76

−0.567

879

Inkheart (Inkworld, #1)

Cornelia Funke

2003

3.88

−0.570

880

The Martian

Andy Weir

2012

4.40

−0.578

881

A Brief History of Time

Stephen Hawking

1988

4.17

−0.578

882

The Forgotten Garden

Kate Morton

2008

4.14

−0.581

883

The Fountainhead

Ayn Rand

1943

3.86

−0.582

884

Fall of Giants (The Century Trilogy, #1)

Ken Follett

2010

4.29

−0.585

885

The Forever War (The Forever War, #1)

Joe Haldeman

1974

4.15

−0.586

886

I’ll Give You the Sun

Jandy Nelson

2014

4.13

−0.590

887

Invisible Monsters

Chuck Palahniuk

1999

4.00

−0.599

888

Lonesome Dove

Larry McMurtry

1985

4.49

−0.604

889

The Cruel Prince (The Folk of the Air, #1)

Holly Black

2018

4.16

−0.605

890

The Stand

Stephen King

1978

4.34

−0.606

891

Dune (Dune, #1)

Frank Herbert

1965

4.22

−0.606

892

Shōgun (Asian Saga, #1)

James Clavell

1975

4.39

−0.607

893

Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng

2014

3.85

−0.609

894

Reached (Matched, #3)

Ally Condie

2012

3.56

−0.612

895

Ready Player One (Ready Player One, #1)

Ernest Cline

2011

4.27

−0.612

896

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway

1940

3.96

−0.614

897

Steelheart (The Reckoners, #1)

Brandon Sanderson

2013

4.16

−0.625

898

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

John Carreyrou

2018

4.45

−0.629

899

Delirium (Delirium, #1)

Lauren Oliver

2011

3.98

−0.629

900

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Cheryl Strayed

2012

4.00

−0.631

901

Darkfever (Fever, #1)

Karen Marie Moning

2006

4.11

−0.640

902

North and South

Elizabeth Gaskell

1854

4.14

−0.644

903

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Neil Gaiman

2013

4.00

−0.648

904

The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, #1)

Stephen King

1982

3.96

−0.656

905

Graceling (Graceling Realm, #1)

Kristin Cashore

2008

4.09

−0.662

906

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad

1902

3.42

−0.662

907

An Ember in the Ashes (An Ember in the Ashes, #1)

Sabaa Tahir

2015

4.30

−0.668

908

All the Bright Places

Jennifer Niven

2015

4.17

−0.670

909

Kafka on the Shore

Haruki Murakami

2002

4.13

−0.682

910

Why Not Me?

Mindy Kaling

2015

3.90

−0.683

911

This is Where I Leave You

Jonathan Tropper

2009

3.89

−0.684

912

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

Doris Kearns Goodwin

2005

4.28

−0.686

913

The Final Empire (Mistborn, #1)

Brandon Sanderson

2006

4.45

−0.686

914

Uglies (Uglies, #1)

Scott Westerfeld

2005

3.86

−0.687

915

The Book Thief

Markus Zusak

2005

4.37

−0.691

916

Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides

2002

4.00

−0.695

917

The White Queen (The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels, #2; The Cousins War #1)

Philippa Gregory

2009

3.92

−0.695

918

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, #1)

Ransom Riggs

2011

3.91

−0.696

919

Beautiful Creatures (Caster Chronicles, #1)

Kami Garcia

2009

3.76

−0.697

920

Gabriel’s Inferno (Gabriel’s Inferno, #1)

Sylvain Reynard

2011

4.01

−0.699

921

Storm Front (The Dresden Files, #1)

Jim Butcher

2000

4.01

−0.702

922

The Hours

Michael Cunningham

1998

3.93

−0.704

923

Inferno (The Divine Comedy #1)

Dante Alighieri

1320

4.00

−0.707

924

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

1866

4.21

−0.709

925

I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You (Gallagher Girls, #1)

Ally Carter

2006

3.83

−0.709

926

I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban

Malala Yousafzai

2012

4.11

−0.712

927

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

John Berendt

1994

3.92

−0.713

928

The Woman in Cabin 10

Ruth Ware

2016

3.69

−0.713

929

The Three Musketeers (The D’Artagnan Romances, #1)

Alexandre Dumas

1844

4.07

−0.718

930

A Wizard of Earthsea

Ursula K. Le Guin

1968

4.00

−0.718

931

A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose

Eckhart Tolle

2005

4.07

−0.721

932

Think and Grow Rich

Napoleon Hill

1937

4.18

−0.721

933

The Haunting of Hill House

Shirley Jackson

1959

3.84

−0.722

934

Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy

1891

3.79

−0.722

935

A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1)

George R. R. Martin

1996

4.45

−0.726

936

Little Bee

Chris Cleave

2008

3.71

−0.731

937

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Taylor Jenkins Reid

2017

4.32

−0.733

938

The Cider House Rules

John Irving

1985

4.12

−0.734

939

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

Gail Honeyman

2017

4.31

−0.740

940

The Fiery Cross (Outlander, #5)

Diana Gabaldon

2001

4.27

−0.742

941

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe

1852

3.86

−0.744

942

Fire (Graceling Realm, #2)

Kristin Cashore

2009

4.11

−0.745

943

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

Malcolm Gladwell

2009

3.94

−0.745

944

Just Kids

Patti Smith

2010

4.14

−0.755

945

The Wind in the Willows

Kenneth Grahame

1908

3.99

−0.762

946

David Copperfield

Charles Dickens

1849

3.98

−0.768

947

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

Stephen R. Covey

1989

4.10

−0.768

948

Where’d You Go, Bernadette

Maria Semple

2012

3.90

−0.770

949

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus

John Gray

1992

3.55

−0.770

950

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Anthony Bourdain

2000

4.07

−0.775

951

Red Queen (Red Queen, #1)

Victoria Aveyard

2015

4.06

−0.775

952

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot

2010

4.06

−0.781

953

Matched (Matched, #1)

Ally Condie

2010

3.67

−0.783

954

A Room with a View

E. M. Forster

1908

3.91

−0.785

955

Wizard’s First Rule (Sword of Truth, #1)

Terry Goodkind

1994

4.13

−0.785

956

And the Mountains Echoed

Khaled Hosseini

2012

4.05

−0.785

957

Grey (Fifty Shades as Told by Christian, #1)

E. L. James

2015

3.78

−0.785

958

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Mary Ann Shaffer

2008

4.16

−0.787

959

The Prince

Niccolò Machiavelli

1513

3.81

−0.799

960

Wicked Lovely (Wicked Lovely, #1)

Melissa Marr

2007

3.69

−0.799

961

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Jamie Ford

2009

4.01

−0.807

962

The Westing Game

Ellen Raskin

1978

4.02

−0.807

963

A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess

1962

3.99

−0.814

964

A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway

1929

3.80

−0.815

965

The Virgin Suicides

Jeffrey Eugenides

1993

3.84

−0.816

966

The Clan of the Cave Bear (Earth’s Children, #1)

Jean M. Auel

1980

4.04

−0.826

967

Anansi Boys

Neil Gaiman

2005

4.02

−0.829

968

Interview with the Vampire (The Vampire Chronicles, #1)

Anne Rice

1976

3.99

−0.832

969

The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, #1–5)

Douglas Adams

1996

4.38

−0.835

970

Fifty Shades of Grey (Fifty Shades, #1)

E. L. James

2011

3.67

−0.836

971

The House of the Spirits

Isabel Allende

1982

4.22

−0.837

972

Les Misérables

Victor Hugo

1862

4.16

−0.839

973

Life of Pi

Yann Martel

2001

3.90

−0.840

974

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Betty Smith

1943

4.26

−0.844

975

Mr. Mercedes (Bill Hodges Trilogy, #1)

Stephen King

2014

3.96

−0.846

976

The Nightingale

Kristin Hannah

2015

4.57

−0.849

977

Inferno (Robert Langdon, #4)

Dan Brown

2013

3.84

−0.850

978

The Red Pyramid (The Kane Chronicles, #1)

Rick Riordan

2010

4.08

−0.850

979

Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Defoe

1719

3.67

−0.852

980

The Sun Is Also a Star

Nicola Yoon

2016

4.09

−0.854

981

Eat, Pray, Love

Elizabeth Gilbert

2006

3.55

−0.855

982

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency #1)

Alexander McCall Smith

1998

3.78

−0.857

983

The Host (The Host, #1)

Stephenie Meyer

2008

3.84

−0.858

984

A Million Little Pieces

James Frey

2003

3.64

−0.863

985

Norwegian Wood

Haruki Murakami

1987

4.03

−0.864

986

Choke

Chuck Palahniuk

2001

3.69

−0.872

987

After You (Me Before You, #2)

Jojo Moyes

2015

3.72

−0.874

988

Pretty Girls

Karin Slaughter

2015

3.99

−0.876

989

Becoming

Michelle Obama

2018

4.58

−0.884

990

I Am Number Four (Lorien Legacies, #1)

Pittacus Lore

2010

3.94

−0.885

991

Turtles All the Way Down

John Green

2017

3.98

−0.885

992

The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer (Mara Dyer, #1)

Michelle Hodkin

2011

4.07

−0.886

993

Will Grayson, Will Grayson

John Green

2010

3.79

−0.887

994

Beneath a Scarlet Sky

Mark T. Sullivan

2017

4.42

−0.892

995

The Road

Cormac McCarthy

2006

3.96

−0.895

996

The Hate U Give

Angie Thomas

2017

4.52

−0.897

997

Foundation (Foundation #1)

Isaac Asimov

1951

4.16

−0.901

998

Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)

Stephen King

2013

4.12

−0.903

999

Veronika Decides to Die

Paulo Coelho

1998

3.70

−0.904

1000

Allegiant (Divergent, #3)

Veronica Roth

2013

3.63

−0.906

1001

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

Ashlee Vance

2015

4.23

−0.909

1002

The Kitchen House

Kathleen Grissom

2010

4.19

−0.917

1003

The Republic

Plato

−380

3.93

−0.920

1004

The Graveyard Book

Neil Gaiman

2008

4.13

−0.927

1005

The World According to Garp

John Irving

1978

4.08

−0.929

1006

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

2012

4.34

−0.931

1007

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston

1937

3.91

−0.931

1008

Before We Were Yours

Lisa Wingate

2017

4.37

−0.931

1009

The Storyteller

Jodi Picoult

2013

4.28

−0.935

1010

A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, #5)

George R. R. Martin

2011

4.33

−0.935

1011

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde

1890

4.07

−0.942

1012

A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1)

Sarah J. Maas

2015

4.25

−0.944

1013

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Victor Hugo

1831

3.99

−0.945

1014

Little Fires Everywhere

Celeste Ng

2017

4.11

−0.946

1015

Firefly Lane (Firefly Lane, #1)

Kristin Hannah

2008

4.07

−0.947

1016

It

Stephen King

1986

4.24

−0.951

1017

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Barack Obama

1995

3.87

−0.953

1018

Throne of Glass (Throne of Glass, #1)

Sarah J. Maas

2012

4.22

−0.955

1019

Before I Fall

Lauren Oliver

2010

3.91

−0.955

1020

Great Expectations

Charles Dickens

1861

3.77

−0.955

1021

A Clash of Kings (A Song of Ice and Fire, #2)

George R. R. Martin

1998

4.41

−0.957

1022

The Good Girl

Mary Kubica

2014

3.81

−0.957

1023

The Great Alone

Kristin Hannah

2018

4.32

−0.960

1024

Wallbanger (Cocktail, #1)

Alice Clayton

2012

4.07

−0.971

1025

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway

1926

3.82

−0.974

1026

Assassin’s Apprentice (Farseer Trilogy, #1)

Robin Hobb

1995

4.15

−0.977

1027

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë

1847

3.85

−0.979

1028

The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes)

Arthur Conan Doyle

1927

4.51

−0.982

1029

The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike, #2)

Robert Galbraith (Pseudonym)

2014

4.04

−0.984

1030

The War of the Worlds

H. G. Wells

1897

3.82

−0.984

1031

Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

Allie Brosh

2013

4.18

−0.986

1032

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes, #3)

Arthur Conan Doyle

1892

4.31

−0.986

1033

Specials (Uglies, #3)

Scott Westerfeld

2006

3.77

−0.991

1034

Running with Scissors

Augusten Burroughs

2002

3.72

−0.994

1035

Breakfast of Champions

Kurt Vonnegut

1973

4.07

−1.000

1036

Room

Emma Donoghue

2010

4.05

−1.005

1037

The Woman in the Window

A. J. Finn

2018

3.93

−1.016

1038

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)

Mindy Kaling

2011

3.85

−1.026

1039

In Cold Blood

Truman Capote

1965

4.07

−1.028

1040

The Angel Experiment (Maximum Ride, #1)

James Patterson

2005

4.08

−1.028

1041

Cold Mountain

Charles Frazier

1997

3.85

−1.033

1042

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

David Sedaris

2008

4.06

−1.041

1043

The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid’s Tale, #1)

Margaret Atwood

1985

4.10

−1.057

1044

The Iliad

Homer

−750

3.85

−1.058

1045

The Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas

1844

4.24

−1.065

1046

Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy, #1)

Chinua Achebe

1959

3.65

−1.069

1047

Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens

1838

3.86

−1.072

1048

Cell

Stephen King

2006

3.65

−1.072

1049

The Heir (The Selection, #4)

Kiera Cass

2015

3.81

−1.081

1050

Cat’s Cradle

Kurt Vonnegut

1963

4.16

−1.089

1051

The Well of Ascension (Mistborn, #2)

Brandon Sanderson

2007

4.37

−1.090

1052

East of Eden

John Steinbeck

1952

4.37

−1.092

1053

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Stephen King

2000

4.33

−1.092

1054

World Without End (Kingsbridge, #2)

Ken Follett

2007

4.26

−1.093

1055

The Scorch Trials (The Maze Runner, #2)

James Dashner

2010

3.92

−1.098

1056

The Invention of Wings

Sue Monk Kidd

2014

4.24

−1.103

1057

The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, #1)

James Dashner

2009

4.02

−1.109

1058

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Hunter S. Thompson

1972

4.08

−1.109

1059

A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens

1859

3.83

−1.110

1060

The Art of War

Sun Tzu

−500

3.97

−1.114

1061

The Martian Chronicles

Ray Bradbury

1949

4.14

−1.116

1062

The Things They Carried

Tim O’Brien

1990

4.13

−1.116

1063

Speaker for the Dead (Ender’s Saga, #2)

Orson Scott Card

1986

4.07

−1.121

1064

Dark Lover (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #1)

J. R. Ward

2005

4.20

−1.122

1065

The Secret (The Secret, #1)

Rhonda Byrne

2006

3.66

−1.123

1066

Shadow and Bone (The Shadow and Bone Trilogy, #1)

Leigh Bardugo

2012

4.03

−1.137

1067

Fallen (Fallen, #1)

Lauren Kate

2009

3.73

−1.140

1068

Artemis Fowl (Artemis Fowl #1)

Eoin Colfer

2001

3.84

−1.145

1069

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

1963

4.00

−1.148

1070

Stardust

Neil Gaiman

1998

4.08

−1.150

1071

The Rosie Project (Don Tillman, #1)

Graeme Simsion

2013

4.02

−1.151

1072

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Patrick Süskind

1985

4.02

−1.157

1073

Fangirl

Rainbow Rowell

2013

4.08

−1.164

1074

Bossypants

Tina Fey

2011

3.95

−1.171

1075

Killing Floor (Jack Reacher, #1)

Lee Child

1997

4.05

−1.171

1076

The Phantom Tollbooth

Norton Juster

1961

4.21

−1.172

1077

Emma

Jane Austen

1815

4.00

−1.189

1078

The Red Tent

Anita Diamant

1997

4.17

−1.189

1079

Origin (Robert Langdon, #5)

Dan Brown

2015

3.85

−1.191

1080

Legend (Legend, #1)

Marie Lu

2011

4.18

−1.191

1081

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

Bill Bryson

1997

4.06

−1.216

1082

Behind Closed Doors

B. A. Paris

2016

3.95

−1.218

1083

The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings, #1–3)

J. R. R. Tolkien

1955

4.49

−1.223

1084

Me Talk Pretty One Day

David Sedaris

2000

3.98

−1.226

1085

The Time Traveler’s Wife

Audrey Niffenegger

2003

3.97

−1.234

1086

The Wise Man’s Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #2)

Patrick Rothfuss

2011

4.57

−1.236

1087

We Were Liars

E. Lockhart

2014

3.84

−1.238

1088

City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1)

Cassandra Clare

2007

4.11

−1.239

1089

Eleanor & Park

Rainbow Rowell

2012

4.08

−1.240

1090

The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver

1998

4.05

−1.243

1091

The City of Ember

Jeanne DuPrau

2003

3.86

−1.247

1092

Rebecca

Daphne du Maurier

1938

4.22

−1.251

1093

Insurgent (Divergent, #2)

Veronica Roth

2012

4.04

−1.254

1094

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: Parts One and Two (Harry Potter, #8)

John Tiffany (Adaptation)

2016

3.66

−1.254

1095

Dracula

Bram Stoker

1897

3.99

−1.266

1096

Eldest (The Inheritance Cycle, #2)

Christopher Paolini

2005

3.98

−1.271

1097

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Malcolm Gladwell

2005

3.92

−1.272

1098

The Art of Racing in the Rain

Garth Stein

2008

4.21

−1.285

1099

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

Kim Edwards

2005

3.66

−1.293

1100

Educated

Tara Westover

2018

4.48

−1.293

1101

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, #1)

Douglas Adams

1979

4.22

−1.297

1102

Cinder (The Lunar Chronicles, #1)

Marissa Meyer

2012

4.15

−1.298

1103

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, #1)

Jenny Han

2014

4.16

−1.299

1104

The Screwtape Letters

C.S. Lewis

1942

4.22

−1.301

1105

Where the Crawdads Sing

Delia Owens

2018

4.50

−1.302

1106

Mansfield Park

Jane Austen

1814

3.85

−1.315

1107

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Dale Carnegie

1936

4.19

−1.333

1108

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Philip K. Dick

1968

4.08

−1.338

1109

Northanger Abbey

Jane Austen

1818

3.81

−1.339

1110

A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire, #4)

George R. R. Martin

2005

4.13

−1.339

1111

The Tattooist of Auschwitz (The Tattooist of Auschwitz, #1)

Heather Morris

2018

4.27

−1.344

1112

Under the Tuscan Sun

Frances Mayes

1996

3.75

−1.352

1113

The Husband’s Secret

Liane Moriarty

2013

3.94

−1.360

1114

Evermore (The Immortals, #1)

Alyson Noel

2009

3.59

−1.362

1115

Milk and Honey

Rupi Kaur

2014

4.11

−1.367

1116

Brisingr (The Inheritance Cycle, #3)

Christopher Paolini

2008

4.05

−1.368

1117

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

Laura Hillenbrand

2010

4.38

−1.371

1118

Dark Places

Gillian Flynn

2009

3.93

−1.377

1119

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium, #1)

Stieg Larsson

2005

4.13

−1.403

1120

She’s Come Undone

Wally Lamb

1992

3.87

−1.404

1121

Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut

1969

4.07

−1.406

1122

The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, #3)

Philip Pullman

2000

4.09

−1.408

1123

The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne

1850

3.40

−1.415

1124

Gone Girl

Gillian Flynn

2012

4.06

−1.419

1125

The Bourne Identity (Jason Bourne, #1)

Robert Ludlum

1980

4.01

−1.424

1126

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Ken Kesey

1962

4.19

−1.425

1127

I, Robot (Robot, #0.1)

Isaac Asimov

1950

4.19

−1.426

1128

A Wrinkle in Time (Time Quintet, #1)

Madeleine L’Engle

1962

4.00

−1.437

1129

The Girl on the Train

Paula Hawkins

2015

3.91

−1.444

1130

Crown of Midnight (Throne of Glass, #2)

Sarah J. Maas

2013

4.45

−1.448

1131

The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck

1939

3.96

−1.449

1132

Mere Christianity

C.S. Lewis

1952

4.32

−1.451

1133

Beautiful Disaster (Beautiful, #1)

Jamie McGuire

2011

4.12

−1.467

1134

Murder on the Orient Express (Hercule Poirot, #10)

Agatha Christie

1934

4.17

−1.477

1135

Paper Towns

John Green

2008

3.83

−1.500

1136

Vampire Academy (Vampire Academy, #1)

Richelle Mead

2007

4.13

−1.502

1137

Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt, #1)

Frank McCourt

1996

4.10

−1.509

1138

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Millennium, #3)

Stieg Larsson

2007

4.22

−1.521

1139

Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson

2011

4.13

−1.526

1140

I Know This Much Is True

Wally Lamb

1998

4.18

−1.526

1141

Dead Until Dark (Sookie Stackhouse, #1)

Charlaine Harris

2001

3.96

−1.529

1142

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou’s Autobiography, #1)

Maya Angelou

1969

4.23

−1.529

1143

Treasure Island

Robert Louis Stevenson

1882

3.83

−1.530

1144

Thirteen Reasons Why

Jay Asher

2007

3.95

−1.533

1145

Looking for Alaska

John Green

2005

4.04

−1.534

1146

Fight Club

Chuck Palahniuk

1996

4.19

−1.541

1147

Scarlet (The Lunar Chronicles, #2)

Marissa Meyer

2013

4.29

−1.543

1148

Fifty Shades Darker (Fifty Shades, #2)

E. L. James

2011

3.85

−1.545

1149

Man’s Search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl

1946

4.36

−1.551

1150

Frankenstein

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

1818

3.79

−1.559

1151

The Lost Symbol (Robert Langdon, #3)

Dan Brown

2009

3.70

−1.564

1152

Marked (House of Night, #1)

P. C. Cast

2007

3.80

−1.568

1153

Anna and the French Kiss (Anna and the French Kiss, #1)

Stephanie Perkins

2010

4.02

−1.569

1154

Sarah’s Key

Tatiana de Rosnay

2006

4.16

−1.572

1155

Big Little Lies

Liane Moriarty

2014

4.26

−1.573

1156

The Death Cure (The Maze Runner, #3)

James Dashner

2011

3.77

−1.584

1157

Eragon (The Inheritance Cycle, #1)

Christopher Paolini

2002

3.89

−1.585

1158

The Thorn Birds

Colleen McCullough

1977

4.23

−1.587

1159

If I Stay (If I Stay, #1)

Gayle Forman

2009

3.95

−1.587

1160

Hush, Hush (Hush, Hush, #1)

Becca Fitzpatrick

2009

3.98

−1.591

1161

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley

1932

3.98

−1.596

1162

A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, #3)

George R. R. Martin

2000

4.54

−1.599

1163

What Alice Forgot

Liane Moriarty

2009

4.08

−1.606

1164

Watchmen

Alan Moore

1987

4.36

−1.615

1165

Fifty Shades Freed (Fifty Shades, #3)

E. L. James

2012

3.86

−1.616

1166

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Lisa See

2005

4.07

−1.616

1167

Water for Elephants

Sara Gruen

2006

4.08

−1.621

1168

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Stephen Chbosky

1999

4.20

−1.623

1169

Siddhartha

Hermann Hesse

1922

4.02

−1.624

1170

Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices, #1)

Cassandra Clare

2010

4.33

−1.625

1171

Persuasion

Jane Austen

1818

4.14

−1.629

1172

The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)

Philip Pullman

1995

3.97

−1.655

1173

Outliers: The Story of Success

Malcolm Gladwell

2008

4.14

−1.658

1174

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Steven D. Levitt

2005

3.96

−1.676

1175

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

Lewis Carroll

1871

4.07

−1.686

1176

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen

1813

4.26

−1.705

1177

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Malcolm Gladwell

2000

3.96

−1.711

1178

The Alchemist

Paulo Coelho

1988

3.86

−1.721

1179

The Other Boleyn Girl (The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels, #9)

Philippa Gregory

2001

4.06

−1.721

1180

The Princess Bride

William Goldman

1973

4.26

−1.726

1181

The Two Towers (The Lord of the Rings, #2)

J. R. R. Tolkien

1954

4.44

−1.733

1182

Sharp Objects

Gillian Flynn

2006

3.96

−1.734

1183

Little Women

Louisa May Alcott

1869

4.06

−1.747

1184

The Chronicles of Narnia (Chronicles of Narnia, #1–7)

C.S. Lewis

1956

4.26

−1.754

1185

The Girl Who Played with Fire (Millennium, #2)

Stieg Larsson

2006

4.24

−1.769

1186

The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #1)

Lemony Snicket

1999

3.94

−1.774

1187

The Lovely Bones

Alice Sebold

2002

3.80

−1.775

1188

The Glass Castle

Jeannette Walls

2005

4.27

−1.779

1189

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Mark Haddon

2003

3.87

−1.790

1190

City of Lost Souls (The Mortal Instruments, #5)

Cassandra Clare

2012

4.28

−1.804

1191

Ender’s Game (Ender’s Saga, #1)

Orson Scott Card

1985

4.30

−1.806

1192

1984

George Orwell

1949

4.18

−1.831

1193

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury

1953

3.98

−1.850

1194

Me Before You (Me Before You, #1)

Jojo Moyes

2012

4.26

−1.872

1195

The Color Purple

Alice Walker

1982

4.20

−1.903

1196

The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1)

J. R. R. Tolkien

1954

4.36

−1.910

1197

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë

1847

4.12

−1.920

1198

Wonder

R. J. Palacio

2012

4.45

−1.929

1199

Sense and Sensibility

Jane Austen

1811

4.07

−1.932

1200

The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

J. R. R. Tolkien

1937

4.27

−1.936

1201

Anne of Green Gables (Anne of Green Gables, #1)

L. M. Montgomery

1908

4.25

−1.947

1202

The Selection (The Selection, #1)

Kiera Cass

2012

4.14

−1.976

1203

The Odyssey

Homer

−700

3.75

−1.979

1204

The Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger

1951

3.80

−1.992

1205

One for the Money (Stephanie Plum, #1)

Janet Evanovich

1994

4.04

−2.013

1206

City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments, #2)

Cassandra Clare

2008

4.19

−2.038

1207

The Shining (The Shining, #1)

Stephen King

1977

4.21

−2.043

1208

Divergent (Divergent, #1)

Veronica Roth

2011

4.20

−2.050

1209

Gone with the Wind

Margaret Mitchell

1936

4.29

−2.053

1210

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Mark Twain

1875

3.91

−2.056

1211

Lord of the Flies

William Golding

1954

3.68

−2.061

1212

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain

1884

3.81

−2.097

1213

Confessions of a Shopaholic (Shopaholic, #1)

Sophie Kinsella

2000

3.64

−2.098

1214

Digital Fortress

Dan Brown

1998

3.64

−2.148

1215

The Devil Wears Prada (The Devil Wears Prada, #1)

Lauren Weisberger

2003

3.73

−2.155

1216

Into the Wild

Jon Krakauer

1996

3.97

−2.166

1217

Breaking Dawn (Twilight, #4)

Stephenie Meyer

2008

3.69

−2.180

1218

The Lost Hero (The Heroes of Olympus, #1)

Rick Riordan

2010

4.35

−2.218

1219

The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini

2003

4.29

−2.222

1220

The Return of the King (The Lord of the Rings, #3)

J. R. R. Tolkien

1955

4.53

−2.257

1221

The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway

1952

3.76

−2.269

1222

The Stranger

Albert Camus

1942

3.97

−2.270

1223

The Da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2)

Dan Brown

2003

3.83

−2.273

1224

The Help

Kathryn Stockett

2009

4.47

−2.276

1225

Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3)

Suzanne Collins

2010

4.03

−2.293

1226

The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1)

Rick Riordan

2005

4.25

−2.316

1227

Tuesdays with Morrie

Mitch Albom

1997

4.10

−2.324

1228

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini

2007

4.36

−2.417

1229

Twilight (Twilight, #1)

Stephenie Meyer

2005

3.59

−2.421

1230

Bridget Jones’s Diary (Bridget Jones, #1)

Helen Fielding

1996

3.77

−2.437

1231

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

1925

3.91

−2.443

1232

Memoirs of a Geisha

Arthur Golden

1997

4.11

−2.529

1233

The Secret Garden

Frances Hodgson Burnett

1910

4.13

−2.537

1234

The Secret Life of Bees

Sue Monk Kidd

2001

4.04

−2.554

1235

My Sister’s Keeper

Jodi Picoult

2004

4.07

−2.596

1236

The Fault in Our Stars

John Green

2012

4.23

−2.610

1237

The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank

1947

4.13

−2.651

1238

The Notebook (The Notebook, #1)

Nicholas Sparks

1996

4.09

−2.811

1239

Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2)

Suzanne Collins

2009

4.29

−2.866

1240

New Moon (Twilight, #2)

Stephenie Meyer

2006

3.53

−2.867

1241

Eclipse (Twilight, #3)

Stephenie Meyer

2007

3.69

−2.880

1242

To Kill a Mockingbird (To Kill a Mockingbird, #1)

Harper Lee

1960

4.27

−2.957

1243

Angels & Demons (Robert Langdon, #1)

Dan Brown

2000

3.89

−2.970

1244

The Giver (The Giver, #1)

Lois Lowry

1993

4.13

−3.061

1245

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5)

J. K. Rowling

2003

4.49

−3.414

1246

The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1)

Suzanne Collins

2008

4.33

−3.432

1247

Animal Farm

George Orwell

1945

3.92

−3.466

1248

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2)

J. K. Rowling

1998

4.41

−3.664

1249

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Harry Potter, #1)

J. K. Rowling

1997

4.47

−3.737

Modeling With Covariates

‘Controlling for’ other variables. What else can we do? The scrape includes some basic metadata, so we can fit a model with them as covariates and get out new coefficients for each book as before—it’s all there, just toss some more variables into the formula.

“Controlling For”?

But it’s worth taking a moment to think about what it would mean to go beyond estimating proportions to fitting a model with covariates like Abandoned ~ Author + Year + Rating + Title.

If we just wanted to rank titles, we have already done that. If you want to know which title has the most readers who then go on to label it ‘abandoned’, there’s not much you can do aside from correcting for sampling error; count the numbers, divide, and sort. The ranking is what it is. Just look at it above! If we add in additional covariates, the meaning of the coefficient numbers change, even if the names like Title do not. So what would the number mean for Title if we added in those other variables?

What does ‘controlling for’ mean? Well, we are looking at an algorithm which tries to minimize its prediction error, by combining multiple variables into a prediction, and the final coefficient number is the marginal effect conditional on the others; this reduces to just ranking for titles alone when there are no others, but when we add the others in, what our new ranking by title coefficient will translate to is something like “what titles were surprisingly likely/unlikely to be abandoned after factoring in how often books published this year, by that author, with those average ratings?”

Perhaps something like “unexpectedly abandoned given what we’d predict”? So Rowling might have a low abandonment rate in general (since the Harry Potter books are so sticky) and her Casual Vacancy rated highly with a minor penalty for being a recently-published book, but then her Casual Vacancy is unexpectedly frequently abandoned (because her legions of fans discover it is really not what they expected nor hoped for), and so its marginal coefficient is extremely high (even as its concrete, absolute, raw abandonment rate is low); this reflects that Casual Vacancy is quite anomalous among J. K. Rowling’s book (which it is), and not necessarily that it is a ‘bad’ book. On the other hand, another book might be by an obscure struggling author with high abandonment rates and rated mediocrely, but is a bit more compelling than expected for such a mediocrity, and so somewhat surprisingly not abandoned too often, and it’ll get ranked quite low; not because it is necessarily better in any way than Casual Vacancy but simply because it is anomalous (in a good way) for its covariates. (If this is confusing, don’t feel bad; think of all the researchers who casually “control for education & SES” or “control for BMI & self-reported diet” and things like that.)

Fitting

Flexibly modeling the covariates with splines. Anyway! With those caveats in mind, let’s fit a baroque model. The binomial & prior & Title are all as before. Author must be treated like Title, as a random effects, because most authors are represented only once and are uninformative. Rating could be treated as just a regular additive variable, but ratings websites tend to have odd distributions of Likert scales, giving ‘J-shaped’ ratings, so I will instead exploit brms’s fancy spline feature to let ratings be modeled as some sort of smooth curve like a quadratic curve, or if no curves turn out to be justified by the data, it’ll fall back to a regular old line/additive variable. Similarly, for Year.percentile: we could treat it as a regular additive variable, but there’s no good reason to think the relationship between publication year & abandonment is linear, so we’ll let the spline figure it out. Finally, because the Author adds in 835 levels, and we have 2 new spline variables, this model will be substantially harder to fit to convergence, and will need to run for much longer; I ran it overnight on my AMD Threadripper.

Results:

library(brms)
gb <- brm(Abandoned|trials(Reads) ~ s(Year.percentile) + s(Rating) + (1|Author) + (1|Title),
    prior=c(prior(student_t(3,0,1), class="sd", group="Title")), family=binomial, data=gr, chains=30, iter=10000)
gb
## Plot the possibly nonlinear effects of Year/Rating:
marginal_effects(gb)
Nonlinear effect of publication date percentile on predicted GoodReads abandonment rate (spline)
Nonlinear effect of average rating (1–5) percentile on predicted GoodReads abandonment rate
## Rank books by coefficient:
rgb <- as.data.frame(ranef(gb)$Title)
rgb <- rgb[order(rgb$Estimate.Intercept, decreasing=TRUE),]
head(rgb, n=50)
#                                                              Estimate.Intercept Est.Error.Intercept Q2.5.Intercept Q97.5.Intercept
# The Casual Vacancy                                                  1.741876609         0.281476983  1.19001267649      2.30289577
# The Chemist                                                         1.587266441         0.250780279  1.07036085240      2.06884029
# Infinite Jest                                                       1.449431926         0.305558801  0.84629547789      2.04348551
# The Glass Bead Game                                                 1.344537965         0.307995293  0.74003704574      1.95158587
# Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002                                 1.256870674         0.278197570  0.71059050369      1.80099836
# Gravity’s Rainbow                                                   1.165383010         0.276765364  0.62329326315      1.69933120
# Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West                  1.156560985         0.300233089  0.56855843405      1.74681282
# The Unconsoled                                                      1.095660050         0.287313105  0.53636629027      1.66013999
# Ulysses                                                             1.048522494         0.297841824  0.46765972763      1.63793080
# The Host (The Host, #1)                                             1.014493672         0.230310063  0.55312203415      1.46168229
# Little, Big                                                         1.012476536         0.448363994  0.12090276666      1.88812074
# The Monstrumologist (The Monstrumologist, #1)                       0.988457042         0.355105336  0.27806260365      1.67888621
# Dandelion Wine                                                      0.975103599         0.280633476  0.42510571471      1.52494322
# Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, #1)                                 0.963443821         0.211581044  0.55036451966      1.37662957
# American Gods (American Gods, #1)                                   0.941171033         0.189903539  0.56971175875      1.30850397
# Bleak House                                                         0.936355723         0.253714907  0.44327736503      1.43655797
# Underworld                                                          0.914496144         0.351775206  0.22000323756      1.60774910
# The Years of Rice and Salt                                          0.904524932         0.279030303  0.35647211675      1.45513845
# Dhalgren                                                            0.900008923         0.440174328  0.03641451487      1.77439496
# I Am a Cat                                                          0.883040852         0.444432162  0.01238843445      1.76210642
# The Silmarillion (Middle-Earth Universe)                            0.861654737         0.247010783  0.38291861129      1.36739720
# Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith                0.846854948         0.352070453  0.15594807111      1.52565917
# It Can’t Happen Here                                                0.838745403         0.442892564 -0.01990111314      1.70470050
# A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court                         0.829646511         0.311586812  0.22130511478      1.43963893
# The Gone-Away World                                                 0.827484825         0.442804235 -0.03667923383      1.69096191
# The Waves                                                           0.820727828         0.285890675  0.26132158033      1.37930626
# Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid                        0.816626681         0.437128163 -0.04353752831      1.67540809
# The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition                          0.809341905         0.441578311 -0.05697029017      1.68484471
# Tender Morsels                                                      0.784969319         0.441631533 -0.10498169773      1.65195379
# Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)                                       0.777043249         0.437648826 -0.08284551560      1.63911701
# 1Q84                                                                0.776369266         0.244856092  0.29537586773      1.25094910
# The Lacuna                                                          0.759484402         0.272298402  0.22625747544      1.28831931
# How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading        0.747111449         0.442452171 -0.11125431192      1.62098481
# Barkskins                                                           0.744000502         0.350624236  0.05288160822      1.43224617
# Bridge of Clay                                                      0.737458793         0.311989629  0.12101640247      1.33840941
# Hild                                                                0.726140501         0.441738217 -0.14334736809      1.57580440
# Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality                         0.725682599         0.443761467 -0.13334026501      1.59044401
# Tender Is the Night                                                 0.725508879         0.307743065  0.12441375362      1.32282931
# Swann's Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)                            0.714724806         0.438353277 -0.14725016691      1.57008149
# Winter's Tale                                                       0.713598568         0.439409311 -0.14859480091      1.57056254
# Perdido Street Station (New Crobuzon, #1)                           0.707905742         0.272161167  0.17611553854      1.24237051
# Zone One                                                            0.699312934         0.352195479  0.00570113601      1.39064540
# Villette                                                            0.698141817         0.350428018  0.00946856345      1.38295155
# The Dovekeepers                                                     0.695801671         0.275740994  0.15586008712      1.23671725
# The Golden Notebook                                                 0.695319765         0.439303760 -0.16519743865      1.54446027
# Three Wishes                                                        0.691457342         0.260047140  0.19221973319      1.19709825
# What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures                               0.688134160         0.264350162  0.15641277774      1.20366679
# The Stand                                                           0.685553475         0.184846308  0.31377846354      1.04337187
# Cryptonomicon                                                       0.684769185         0.209651679  0.28237060226      1.09454115
# Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell #1)                                      0.683110921         0.352403909 -0.03925119519      1.37325692

Interpreting Covariate-Adjusted Rankings

Anomaly explanations: mismatch, fads, slogs, & niche. As warned, the rankings are different from the regular rankings, because it’s estimating something different and not some ‘corrected’ version: these are better thought of as ‘surprisingly often-abandoned given their author/rating’. This could reflect a book being critically overrated, or some phenomena causing serious mismatch between a book & readers. With this in mind, some examples are interesting and make sense:

  • Wrong Audience: The Casual Vacancy shows up again: from what I’ve read about it, I think that is simply due to Harry Potter readers picking it up because J. K. Rowling wrote it, and discovering it was nothing like Harry Potter.

    Meyer’s The Chemist may be a similar case—instead of a supernatural romance like her Twilight series, it’s an action-thriller potboiler about an ex-government agent on the run etc.

  • Overrated Prestige: Dhalgren shows up, and I’d consider that one probably due to being critically overrated—Delany was a critical darling because he was ‘black’ and ‘gay’ and ‘transgressive’, but I do not award books points for those traits & was deeply unimpressed by what I read of Dhalgren (& the man himself when I went to his panels at SF conventions), and I appear to not be alone in this.

  • Highly Rated But Difficult: I suspect I Am A Cat & The Silmarillion mix those two explanations: few would read The Silmarillion if that was all Tolkien had written, but it’s also genuinely difficult, despite its rewards.

  • Polarizing: The presence of a few like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Perdido Street Station, and Cryptonomicon are a little more puzzling: none of those are hard to read, and they aren’t really pushed on school curriculums or radically different from the author’s other work, nor are they critically vaunted (3 of the 4 are much more likely to be harshly insulted by literary professors & critics as problematic).

    I suspect for those, it’s neither being critically overrated nor reaching the wrong argument, but being intrinsically polarizing and ‘love it or hate it’—they appeal to a niche of readers. I greatly enjoyed A Connecticut Yankee because I like worldbuilding and development and proto-steampunk, and the plot being silly and the economics/technology tremendously overly-optimistic didn’t bother me; but I could easily imagine someone else who hates it like poison and being unable to finish it. Similarly, Cryptonomicon: discussion of how to implement cryptography with a deck of cards? Bring. It. On. (But for other people maybe not so much.)

    This is consistent with the average rating results: polarizing books may get lower reviews/ratings, as extreme as being abandoned, but they still earn high average ratings from those who like it (and the latter will tend to self-select into reading them).

    Perhaps polarizing books are an example of what one should strive for? Find something & do it well—aiming for the moon instead of mediocrity. In the contemporary world, as Tim O’Reilly noted all the way back in 2002, “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.”. The downside is relatively bounded—it’s hard for a book to do worse than simply vanish into ignominious obscurity—and the upside is nigh-unlimited, but the average book is simply a failure. I’m reminded of an OKCupid dating photo analysis which argued that it’s more important to have profile photos that stand out from the crowd & polarize the opposite-sex, perhaps by appealing to niches (like having tattoos) than ones which are uncontroversially ‘pretty’.

See Also

Appendix

Abandoned: “List of Books Voted Most Abandoned”

GoodReads also has a list for voting on frequently-abandoned books, but after looking at it, the data seems to be garbage and deeply unrepresentative of GoodReads readers in general, so I abandoned any further analysis of it.

I noticed while looking for API help that there was a similar list, but constructed using voting: “The Most Begun ‘Read but Unfinished’ (Initiated) book ever”. GR users can vote on books (either casting a vote from a book or, default, not voting on it), and add new books to the list. The list page reports that it covers 2,329 books, and has votes from 12,525 voters.

With the idea of perhaps combining the two datasets in a latent variable factor analysis to get a more accurate measure of abandonment, I extracted the data from it, same as with the tag.

Loading the CSV up, counting shows it has recorded 47,897 votes or ~20 votes per book on the list. The data is, however, so skewed as to be borderline useless:

gv <- read.csv("https://gwern.net/doc/culture/2019-12-09-goodreads-votinglist-abandoned.csv",
    colClasses=c("factor", "factor", "numeric",  "integer", "integer"))
skim(gv)
# Skim summary statistics
#  n obs: 2327
#  n variables: 5
#
# ── Variable type:factor ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
#  variable missing complete    n n_unique                         top_counts ordered
#    Author       0     2327 2327     1707 Ste: 23, Ann: 14, Cha: 10, Mic: 10   FALSE
#     Title       0     2327 2327     2317     Ali: 2, And: 2, Aut: 2, Bri: 2   FALSE
#
# ── Variable type:integer ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
#  variable missing complete    n      mean        sd p0    p25   p50   p75    p100     hist
#     Reads       0     2327 2327 130479.28 385056.57  1 2036.5 14864 84767 6239642 ▇▁▁▁▁▁▁▁
#     Votes       0     2327 2327     20.58    104.76  1    1       1     3    1991 ▇▁▁▁▁▁▁▁
#
# ── Variable type:numeric ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
#  variable missing complete    n mean   sd p0  p25  p50  p75 p100     hist
#    Rating       0     2327 2327 3.84 0.35  0 3.67 3.88 4.06    5 ▁▁▁▁▁▃▇▁

Effectively, aside from the top 300 books, books have only 1 or 2 votes. Still, I gave it a chance, albeit with heavier regularization:

bgv <- brm(Votes|trials(Reads) ~ (1|Title), prior=c(prior(student_t(3,0,0.5), class="sd", group="Title")),
    family=binomial, data=gv, chains=30)
bgv
# Formula: Votes | trials(Reads) ~ (1 | Title)
#    Data: gv (Number of observations: 2327)
# Samples: 30 chains, each with iter = 2000; warmup = 1000; thin = 1;
#          total post-warmup samples = 30000
#
# Group-Level Effects:
# ~Title (Number of levels: 2317)
#               Estimate Est.Error l-95% CI u-95% CI Eff.Sample Rhat
# sd(Intercept)     1.93      0.04     1.85     2.00       1356 1.02
#
# Population-Level Effects:
#           Estimate Est.Error l-95% CI u-95% CI Eff.Sample Rhat
# Intercept    -8.90      0.04    -8.99    -8.81        975 1.03
bgvr <- as.data.frame(ranef(bgv)$Title); bgvr <- bgvr[order(bgvr$Estimate.Intercept, decreasing=TRUE),]
head(bgvr, n=30)
#                                Estimate.Intercept Est.Error.Intercept Q2.5.Intercept Q97.5.Intercept
# How to Read a Page: A Cours...         5.38204009        1.2305407158   2.6889175683      7.46299219
# Finnegans Wake                         5.09604001        0.0784560406   4.9395880468      5.24884339
# Adept (The Wiccan Diaries #3)          4.98646278        1.1811990071   2.3623513076      6.96201323
# Who Moved My Bone: A Guide ...         4.95494745        1.1611594828   2.3886414505      6.89145803
# The Scarlet Letter and Othe...         4.74029863        0.1680566097   4.3998550261      5.06238828
# Ulysses                                4.73227532        0.0508705552   4.6333361209      4.83198213
# Gravity’s Rainbow                      4.60794433        0.0651088164   4.4806395498      4.73529781
# Obras completas                        4.37501582        0.7559132531   2.7108179987      5.64226480
# Dianetics: The Modern Scien...         4.27649757        0.1979955275   3.8732683273      4.64355668
# Neophyte (The Wiccan Diarie...)        4.15909507        1.0569860403   1.7519603753      5.91731061
# Realmgolds (The Gryphon Cle...)        4.10459375        1.0194113326   1.8366736192      5.78690229
# Infinite Jest                          4.03234211        0.0619999259   3.9111099731      4.15344818
# American Junk                          3.87078182        0.9922211213   1.6522260087      5.52190577
# The Satanic Verses                     3.82457833        0.0718885158   3.6828805976      3.96392974
# The American Heritage Dicti...         3.80920846        0.7108850861   2.2099731437      5.00493848
# Holy Bible: King James Version         3.77235163        0.0526127709   3.6691860039      3.87512458
# The Wiccan Diaries (The Wic...)        3.74341315        0.9991628239   1.5006262229      5.40201310
# The Journal of Joyce Carol ...         3.65267531        0.7142768009   2.0675646812      4.86252960
# The Art of Interior Design:...         3.64215451        1.8634692814  -0.1039907607      7.22634805
# Prague and Bohemia: Medieva...         3.64105168        1.8494993932  -0.0422548391      7.19596699
# Alphabets Sublime: Contempo...         3.63497694        1.8612179073  -0.0378189700      7.19803265
# Swann's Way (In Search of L...)        3.63054368        0.0829307061   3.4682225579      3.79141887
# Murphy Blue                            3.62759642        1.8880145651  -0.1063323453      7.28576732
# In Search of Lost Time (6 V...)        3.62753180        0.1515961350   3.3232938116      3.91714796
# Spies and Saucers                      3.56821959        1.8299110410  -0.1192548224      7.04941588
# Quantum Gods: Creation Cha...          3.54662054        0.9733951263   1.3588060829      5.16892444
# Kobrin in There with the Kids          3.52129542        1.7882763228  -0.0855424774      6.8839114
# [Arabic book]...                       3.51498925        1.8135874144  -0.1436548668      6.90342934
# Parkway                                3.48491516        1.7801420369  -0.1339575798      6.80541442
# Mason & Dixon                          3.47998067        0.1664473049   3.1457974255      3.79687113

The results, while not totally absurd (Infinite Jest still shows up), are too idiosyncratic to take seriously. The American Heritage Dictionary, really? An Arabic book? And the voters seem to have something against The Wiccan Diaries

This hardly even overlaps with the tag dataset, and so I abandoned the idea of trying to pool them.


  1. Two alternative tags, “couldn’t finish”/“didn’t finish”, are much less popular, but after I did this analysis, I learned of “dnf” (did not finish), which is noticeably more popular than “abandoned”. In hindsight, that might’ve been better to analyze. (On the other hand, “dnf” is hard to find and the list seems heavy on genre fiction, so I wonder if it’s used by a niche group of readers and much more unrepresentative of GR than ‘abandoned’?)↩︎

  2. !Margin: Fixing GoodReads.↩︎

  3. Yes, I did finish (and enjoy) Infinite Jest. The trick was keeping a finger or bookmark at the last endnote, so flipping back and forth wasn’t too much of a hassle.↩︎

  4. !Margin: GR sits on a throne of lies.↩︎

  5. Example Bash script:

    ## eg. https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/abandoned?page=1
    (for i in {1..25}; do
      elinks -dump "https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/abandoned?page=$i" \
      | grep -E --before=3 --after=1 "shelved .* times as abandoned"
      sleep 2s
    done) > gr-abandoned.txt
    ↩︎
  6. Yes, yes, ‘and even the author abandoned it!’ You are very clever.↩︎

  7. Vox’s (otherwise highly complimentary) reviewer admits:

    But while I may respect James’s choice as a critic, as a reader, I found much of Black Leopard to be a slog. It’s difficult to push through page after page of beautiful sentences—and James’s sentences really are stunning—that are organized specifically to avoid telling you who is doing what or why and why you should care. Sure, truth is unstable, stories don’t need resolution, the gods are dead, etc. etc., but would it kill this book to give me a single concrete arc to hang onto? It’s 620 pages long! Cut a girl a break!

    ↩︎
  8. Although again I will note that low abandon-rates don’t necessarily mean high-quality—it simply means those readers who chose to start them tended to finish them, for whatever reason.↩︎