In The News – What is the Internet’s Favorite Book?

By Dan Kopf

Which is the better book: War and Peace or installment one of The Hunger Games? 

If you ask a book reviewer or look at any of the “Best Book” lists compiled by  critics, you would say War and Peace. But what if you asked everyday readers on the Internet?

Over four million members of the website Goodreads have rated the first installment of The Hunger Games on a 1-5 scale, and it has received an average score of 4.36. It currently sits atop a Goodreads crowdsourced list of “Best Books Ever”. By comparison, the average score given by the 150,000 people who have rated War and Peace is 4.10, and it ranks 724th on the “Best Books Ever list”.

It’s no surprise that on a crowdsourced ratings site, a briskly paced young adult novel beat out a dense, 1,000 page philosophical epic about Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. And it’s probably not exactly the same group of people rating the Hunger Games and War and Peace. They likely have different backgrounds and expectations in literature.

Still, Goodreads ratings provide a glimpse into the literature that people actually like the most, and how that might differ from the critics. We know what the literati think from the variety of literary prizes and lists of books you must read before you die. But what do the people say? We collected the ratings for tens of thousands of books on Goodreads to find out.