Don’t worry, there are still a few weeks left to meet your Goodreads (or Storygraph, or reading bujo, or mental) reading goal for the year! Today, though, Goodreads shared some data about this year’s reading challenge. More than 6.5 million people set a Goodreads goal this year, hoping to read a collective 320 million books.
They also released a list of the top 60 books that were read towards this year’s goal — that is, the books marked as “Read” by users who were participating in the 2022 Goodreads Challenge. They include buzzy new releases as well as backlist that’s been getting a lot of attention recently (hello, Colleen Hoover).
Here the top ten:
It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Verity by Colleen Hoover
The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood
Reminders of Him by Colleen Hoover
Book Lovers by Emily Henry
Ugly Love by Colleen Hoover
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
A few things jump out in this top ten. One, of course, is Colleen Hoover’s dominance of the list, which is not a surprise, considering her books have also been at the top of the bestseller lists all year. Relatedly, these are also mostly BookTok favorites, which shows how much BookTok really influences readers. And finally, this top ten is a very white list, which is also not unrelated. While BookTok has a diversity of creators who share books in their own niches and interests, the books that float to the top of the most For You Pages tend to not be very diverse. Fingers crossed that next year this list will be a little more varied — in terms of authors, representation, genre, and more.
Some other notable books in the top 60 include The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han, which was turned into a Netflix show this year; Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, which was one of the buzziest memoirs of 2022; and They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera, a BookTok favorite that got a prequel this year.
Check out the full list at Goodreads.
Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.
