From Goodreads:
Here at Goodreads World Headquarters, we like to occasionally step back for a really high-altitude assessment of readers' favorite books. The idea behind today's collection: Identify the most popular books published over the past 100 years, as determined by Goodreads members' digital shelves.
To do this, we trawled through the most popular books on Goodreads and sorted by publication date, from 1925 to 2024. Then we picked out one title from at or near the top of each year. We didn't always grab the top book for a few reasons. Repeats, for one—some eras are very Agatha Christie, for instance. Other years had multiple good contenders for the top spot and we resorted to metaphorical arm wrestling to determine which book made it in.
We're looking to curate a list that covers a wide range of genres, topics, authors, and ideas. You'll see several stone-cold classics, along with a few books you probably read in your high school English class.