Top 10 Books You’re Embarrassed to Admit You’ve Read

Rebecca Joines Schinsky

Chief of Staff

Rebecca Joines Schinsky is the executive director of product and ecommerce at Riot New Media Group. She co-hosts All the Books! and the Book Riot Podcast. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaschinsky.

In our latest reader poll, we asked you to fess up to the books you’ve read but would rather no one know about. 581 Riot readers answered the call, listing 380 unique titles. There’s a lot of variety to be found in the full set of responses, but your readerly shame is undeniably concentrated around a handful of titles. Here are the top 10 responses, featuring vampires, romance and erotica, and vampire-related romance and erotica.

NB: For clarity, all mentions of titles in the Twilight Saga, Hunger Games trilogy, Fifty Shades trilogy, and Sookie Stackhouse series were combined.

  1. The Twilight Saga (315 votes)
  2. Fifty Shades trilogy (178)
  • The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (34)
  • Romance novels (24)
  • Hunger Games series (17)
  • Sookie Stackhouse (16)
  • The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller (14)
  • Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews (13)
  • Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (11)
  • Sleeping Beauty series by A.N. Roquelaure/Anne Rice (11)

    There’s interesting overlap here with the results of our poll showing readers’ 25 most-hated books, and Fifty Shades also appeared on the list of top books you pretend to have read.

    Fellow Rioter Minh took a crack at the data and discovered these connections:

    Top 10 Books We’re Too Embarrassed to Admit Reading

    Most Hated - Embarrassed Venn

     

    What do you make of these results, Rioters? Any surprises here?

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