What Are the Most Discussed Books on the Internet?

As a person who discusses books on the internet for a living, sometimes I have weird, random thoughts, like “what are the most discussed books on the internet?” And then, “how might I figure out which books are most discussed on the internet?” And then, “why don’t I Google it?” After that, I stop thinking and start Googling. In the end, in an attempt to answer my question, I Googled 275 different books in order to compare the total number of results, according to Google.

This number, by the way, is an estimate—a Google Webmaster described it as “a ballpark figure,” but it may be even less accurate than that. Even the estimate can vary a lot, based on a whole host of different factors, like where you are and what else you’ve searched for (in your whole entire life). But even if the numbers themselves are approximate, they may still have relative meaning, especially when accessed from the same computer, using the same browser, on the same day: at the very least, they should be able to tell us, in a general way, which books have been referenced more or less than others online.

It’s important to remember that this is not exactly the same as true popularity—plenty of bestsellers, especially older bestsellers, published when the internet was less of a driving force in book marketing, were relatively low-ranked here. Recent big-budget adaptations obviously help. So does drama. So does being ripe for academic inquiry. The fact that Rupi Kaur’s book is only in the middle of this list proves to me that Google does not do a good job of searching Instagram. Still, I admit that I was surprised by some of these—particularly by the relatively low ranking of some of the books that to me, in my corner of the internet, seem discussed to death. (My anecdote-based human brain wants to turn this into a case for these numbers being all completely meaningless, but it also wants to believe that I didn’t Google 275 books for nothing, so really, it’s a toss-up.)

A note on search strategies: my baseline technique was to search the author’s name and the book title together, both in quotes. I adjusted this a little if the title or name was very common; when relevant, I often omitted the article in a title to accommodate casual references (lots of times I tried this, it didn’t matter, but sometimes it did). That said, who knows what could be lurking in those millions of results? Another reason to think of these numbers in ballpark terms only.

A note on the books: the only way I could approach this was by searching books that I thought might be high ranking, one by one. This means that if I didn’t think of the book, it didn’t make the list. I have likely forgotten a number of popular bestsellers published over the last hundred years or so. But listen, I had to stop somewhere. Unlike Google, time is finite.

So for whatever it’s worth (or not), here’s what the machine overlords came back with:

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four – 12,997,000*
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings – 8,630,000**
William Shakespeare, Hamlet – 8,240,000
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird – 5,600,000
William Shakespeare, Macbeth -5,540,000
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice – 5,530,000
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit – 4,690,000
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet – 4,680,000
Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods – 4,440,000
Michelle Obama, Becoming – 4,410,000
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – 4,310,000***
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick – 4,260,000
Henry David Thoreau, Walden – 4,180,000
E.L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey – 4,130,000
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto – 3,800,000
Plato, The Republic – 3,690,000
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre – 3,450,000
Alan Moore, Watchmen – 3,400,000
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby – 3,300,000
Homer, The Odyssey – 3,050,000
Homer, The Iliad – 2,920,000
Frank Herbert, Dune – 2,670,000
Diana Gabaldon, Outlander – 2,660,000
Stephenie Meyer, Twilight – 2,620,000
Stephen King, The Shining – 2,540,000
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary – 2,490,000
George Orwell, Animal Farm – 2,460,000
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations – 2,300,000
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden – 2,280,000
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women – 2,260,000
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games – 2,080,000
James Joyce, Ulysses – 1,850,000
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale – 1,800,000
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield – 1,780,000
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – 1,630,000
Barack Obama, A Promised Land – 1,610,000
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 – 1,600,000
Roald Dahl, Matilda – 1,560,000
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars – 1,480,000
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales  – 1,460,000
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita – 1,430,000
Veronica Roth, Divergent – 1,410,000
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote – 1,380,000
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream – 1,340,000
Joseph Heller, Catch-22 – 1,320,000
Jack Kerouac, On the Road – 1,320,000
Neil Gaiman, American Gods – 1,300,000
Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing – 1,290,000
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations – 1,270,000
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince – 1,270,000
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye – 1,260,000
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World – 1,240,000
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow – 1,230,000
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina – 1,100,000
Toni Morrison, Beloved – 1,090,000
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace – 1,060,000
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness – 1,040,000
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code – 998,000
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar – 986,000
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – 984,000
Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca – 984,000
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy – 979,000
Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – 972,000
Neil Gaiman, Good Omens – 905,000
John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men – 888,000
C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – 791,000
Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl – 791,000
Albert Camus, The Stranger – 790,000
Arthur Miller, The Crucible – 790,000
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea – 782,000
Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind – 782,000
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl – 776,000
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart – 771,000
Virgil, The Aeneid – 760,000
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights – 756,000
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle – 753,000
Richard Adams, Watership Down – 753,000
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – 735,000
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me – 725,000
Cormac McCarthy, The Road – 719,000
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass – 713,000
Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express – 713,000
George Eliot, Middlemarch – 703,000
Sylvia Plath, Ariel – 695,000
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels – 690,000
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis – 682,000
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged – 681,000
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway – 660,000
Edward Said, Orientalism – 650,000
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass – 649,000
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time – 640,000
Art Spiegelman, Maus – 638,000
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath – 637,000
Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey – 633,000
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin – 633,000
Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner – 611,000
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo – 607,000
John Grisham, A Time to Kill – 603,000
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse – 592,000
Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables – 585,000
Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones – 584,000
John Green, Looking for Alaska – 583,000
Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood – 580,000
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time – 579,000
Markus Zusak, The Book Thief – 573,000
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence – 551,000
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall – 541,000
Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give – 541,000
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club – 539,000
Malcolm Gladwell, Blink – 538,000
Truman Capote, In Cold Blood – 521,000
Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – 516,000
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – 515,000
Alice Walker, The Color Purple – 513,000
Paula Hawkins, The Girl on The Train – 509,000
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five – 506,000
Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None – 505,000
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams – 500,000
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis – 495,000
P. L. Travers, Mary Poppins – 469,000
Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’ Diary – 468,000
Trevor Noah, Born a Crime – 449,000
Donna Tartt, The Secret History – 445,000
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man – 439,000
John Williams, Stoner – 435,000
Yann Martel, Life of Pi – 420,000
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises – 411,000
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go – 409,000
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince – 397,000
William Gibson, Neuromancer – 397,000
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – 394,000
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy – 389,000
Franz Kafka, The Trial – 387,000
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God – 381,000
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – 375,000
Kathryn Stockett, The Help – 372,000
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – 368,000
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment – 361,000
Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels – 356,000
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose – 353,000
Alex Haley, Roots – 352,000
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah – 350,000
Jonathan Franzen, Freedom – 344,000
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye – 341,000
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk – 323,000
Ian McEwan, Atonement – 319,000
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon – 317,000
Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World – 315,000
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time – 305,000
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad – 302,000
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried – 300,000
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest – 293,000
Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove – 291,000
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – 284,000
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House – 282,000
Richard Wright, Native Son – 280,000
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl – 280,000
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas – 279,000
Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave – 273,000
André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name – 272,000
Don DeLillo, Underworld – 263,000
D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover – 258,000
Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun – 246,000
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore – 243,000
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury – 242,000
Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club – 241,000
Toni Morrison, Sula – 239,000
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth – 239,000
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things – 239,000
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude – 238,000
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique – 235,000
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian – 234,000
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front – 232,000
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace – 230,000
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov – 226,000
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being – 226,000
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children – 224,000
Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow – 223,000
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time – 219,000
Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen – 218,000
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep – 217,000
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood – 215,000
Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes – 211,000
Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones – 208,000
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex – 203,000
Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven – 199,000
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day – 198,000
Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery –  197,000
Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing – 197,000
Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City – 191,000
Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – 191,000
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying – 187,000
Roberto Bolaño, 2666 – 187,000
Roxane Gay, Hunger – 187,000
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited – 186,000
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness – 186,000
Zadie Smith, White Teeth – 181,000
Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street – 177,000
Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land – 175,000
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea – 173,000
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon – 171,000
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife – 170,000
E.M. Forster, Howards End – 170,000
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider – 168,000
Nella Larsen, Passing – 168,000
Stendhal, The Red and the Black – 165,000
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead – 165,000
Alex Haley and Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X – 164,000
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son – 163,000
J.M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy – 162,000
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient – 160,000
John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces – 160,000
Willa Cather, My Ántonia – 158,000
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities – 157,000
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow – 156,000
Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea – 154,000
Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley – 150,000
Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits – 148,000
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room – 147,000
Terry McMillan, How Stella Got Her Groove Back – 143,000
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore – 139,000
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber – 139,000
Don DeLillo, White Noise – 139,000
A.S. Byatt, Possession – 139,000
Philip Roth, American Pastoral – 138,000
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves – 137,000
Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth – 136,000
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! – 136,000
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio – 133,000
Jhumpa Lahiri, The Interpreter of Maladies – 133,000
Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find – 132,000
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping – 129,000
Octavia Butler, Kindred – 128,000
Willa Cather, O Pioneers! – 127,000
Sojourner Truth, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth – 127,000
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire – 126,000
Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle – 126,000
Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy – 125,000
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated – 125,000
Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities – 122,000
Jean Toomer, Cane – 118,000
Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind – 118,000
Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections – 115,000
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell – 115,000
James Baldwin, Go Tell It On the Mountain – 115,000
Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad – 113,000
Philip Roth, The Plot Against America – 112,000
John le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – 109,000
Sarah Waters, Fingersmith  – 109,000
Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep – 108,000
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint – 104,000
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony – 102,000
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road – 101,000
José Saramago, Blindness – 101,000
Marguerite Duras, The Lover – 96,300
Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – 95,700
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior – 87,100
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem – 86,600
Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – 84,700
Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love – 83,400
Jacqueline Susann, Valley of the Dolls – 80,200
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – 76,600
Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – 69,400
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – 67,300
Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine – 66,300
Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides – 66,200
Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima – 60,700
Maggie Nelson, Bluets – 57,300
Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – 56,000
Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son – 53,700
Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place – 51,300
Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory – 51,000
Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren – 42,900
Edward P. Jones, The Known World – 40,100

* Because the title is regularly styled in two different ways, this figure was reached by combining the 11,800,000 instances of “1984” and 997,000 of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”

** I know this is technically three books (though he always wanted them to be published as one); for better or for worse I thought it made more functional sense to go with the title of the trilogy in this case.

*** This figure was reached by combining the results for the US and UK titles for this book: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (UK) had 2,720,000 mentions and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (US) had 1,590,000.