What are the "best" books on Goodreads, based on user ratings?
One answer might be: those with the highest average rating. But in practice, this metric is skewed towards new books and books with few ratings. Cutoffs and weights can be used to counterbalance that, but not without added complexity and arbitrariness.
This page gives a different answer, using the idea of a Pareto frontier. Say that book A "dominates" book B if A is older, has more ratings, and has a higher average rating than B. Now take the set of all books on Goodreads, and remove every book which is dominated by any other. You are left with the Pareto frontier, or set of undominated books. Like apex predators in the animal kingdom, these "apex books" are at the top of the "book chain".
Below are the apex books of Goodreads, ordered by date of publication. They turn out to be a nice mix of items combining popularity (high rating count), longevity (early publication), and reputation (high average rating).
Note: There is some overlap among the items. For example, some are collected works which also appear individually. In the interest of transparency, I have refrained from merging or removing these, and have left the list as it was generated.
Caveat: My dataset was limited to books with at least 10,000 ratings, so only those appear here. If anyone has a good way to get books with fewer ratings, I would be interested.
List compiled by Tim Smith. Last updated: 2023-09-17