100 Years of Popular Books on Goodreads

"This is a fun one: For the collection below, we decided to take a long-arc overview and try to identify the most popular books published over the past 100 years, as determined by Goodreads members' digital shelves. To do this, we went year by year and picked one title from among the top of each pile.

However, we didn't always just grab the very top book for several reasons. Repeats, for instance (some entire eras are Very Stephen King). And some years saw multiple Very, Very Important Works published. Ah, the backstage agony of debating the relative merits of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka!Mostly we wanted to curate a list that would cover a range of genres and suggest the breadth of reading interests over time. And OK, full confession, it tickled our fancy to be able to put Ulysses and Malibu Rising on the same list."