
The 35 Most Powerful Books You’ve Read
In our latest reader poll, we asked about the most powerful books you’ve read. Not necessarily your favorites, or the ones that gave you the most enjoyable reading experiences, but the books that left a lasting impression on you and maybe even changed your life.
1037 Riot readers answered the call, each sharing up to three selections. After removing unusable entries (did you know that bookternet trolls like to write naughty words into surveys?) and a few authors’ obvious attempts to game the system (don’t do that, we’ll catch you), we wound up with 1158 unique titles. That is A LOT of unique titles, and even the top title was only mentioned by 11% of readers. This tells me that what makes a book powerful has a whole lot do with who we are as readers. But there were some far-and-away favorites. Check out the top 35 below, and click to see the full response set.
Did the most powerful books you’ve read make the list? Any surprised? What do you think?
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (123 votes)
- The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling (59)
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (54)