Between our newsletters, podcasts, and the site, Book Riot recommends hundreds of books every month, but which of those recommendations are sticking? We don’t have perfect data on that, but we do have a proxy: the books you all clicked on the most. It’s hard for us to know whether a book gets clicked on because you wanted to buy it right then and there or because you just wanted to learn more about it. Either way, it’s an interesting thing to track, especially because it doesn’t neatly map onto our most popular posts. For example, none of the books on our most popular article of the month — 8 of the Worst Science Fiction Worlds To Live In — appears on this list.
First, let’s take a quick aside to go over the most popular posts on Book Riot last month. Then, we’ll take a tour through the most clicked-on books and where they appeared on the site. We’ve got award-nominated books, romantasy, horror short stories, and lots more!
The Most Clicked Books on Book Riot in September
#10:
Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
This was written about in September because of it’s a finalist for the 2024 National Book Awards! It was linked in this announcement post, and then Erica Ezeifedi recommended it in this list of award-nominated books to read with your book club: “Here, Cornejo Villavicencio, author of The Undocumented Americans, shares another tale illuminating the life of undocumented people living in the United States, this time in fiction form. The eponymous Catalina — she herself undocumented — goes to live with her undocumented grandparents following a tragedy. As she prepares to graduate from Harvard — after having gotten into certain bougie subcultures there — she’s faced with helping her grandparents, and the uncertainty of finding work after graduation as an undocumented person.”
#9:
There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
Forgive the meta moment, but many of these clicks on this title came from The 10 Most Popular Books on Book Riot in August 2024. That post was also excerpted in the list of the Most Read Books On Goodreads in August. Here’s how Rachel Brittain describes it in Past Tense, Book Riot’s historical fiction newsletter: “On the banks of the Tigris River, the ancient city of Nineveh becomes the birthplace of an epic story: The Epic of Gilgamesh. Centuries later, the lives of three outsiders — a poor publishing apprentice in 1840s London, a ten-year-old girl losing her hearing in 2014 Turkey, and a divorcée living on a houseboat on the River Thames — are brought together by the rivers they live alongside and the stories that transcend time.”
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#7:
Held by Anne Michaels
Speaking of book awards, this is on the 2024 Book Prize shortlist, which we announced in a news post and discussed twice in our book news newsletter Today in Books. Here’s how Erica recommends it: “The latest by poet and novelist Michaels is both spectral and ethereal. It opens in 1917 as John, a British soldier, lies barely holding onto life on a battlefield in France. As he lies there, memories play on a loop — his coastal childhood, chance pub encounters, and time spent in hot baths with lovers. When he returns home, he’s reunited with his artist wife, Helena, and reopens a photography business. But the past keeps resurfacing, in his own trauma, but in another way as well — he can see faint images of the loved ones of photography subjects. As the narrative continues on — including both fictional and historical figures like the Curies — the thin space between life and death is explored through John and generations of his descendants.”
#6:
James by Percival Everett
#5:
The Sweetest Oblivion by Danielle Lori
This one is a puzzle. The one and only time it’s been mentioned on Book Riot is in a bullet point in the post The Spiciest Books on BookTok in 2024, According to Readers, which was posted in June. That article didn’t get a big spike in traffic in September, so I’m not sure why it’s getting a lot of clicks — it must be that the readers of that post are more motivated to click through than most. This was the #1 book on that list of spiciest books on BookTok, and it’s a mafia romance.
English (US) · 