An alternative to the popular "Best Books Ever" list, focusing on the less popular. You can vote for any book, in any genre so long as it has between 1,000 and 10,000 ratings on GRs. Before you add a book, please take a moment to look up its ratings on GRs to ensure it meets the parameters for this list.
There are lists for even more obscure books at:
Underrated Books (1,001 - 5,000 GR ratings)
Really Underrated Books (fewer than 1,000 GR ratings)
Really Seriously Underrated Books (fewer than 500 GR ratings)
REALLY Really Underrated Books (fewer than 100 GR ratings)
Super Underrated Books (fewer than 50 GR ratings)
Ridiculously Underrated Books (fewer than 20 GR ratings)
Really Underrated Children's Books (children's books with fewer than 100 GR ratings)
Just One Rating
Alternatively, see lists of books with the most ratings.
You might also want to check out obscure books worth considering: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...
There are lists for even more obscure books at:
Underrated Books (1,001 - 5,000 GR ratings)
Really Underrated Books (fewer than 1,000 GR ratings)
Really Seriously Underrated Books (fewer than 500 GR ratings)
REALLY Really Underrated Books (fewer than 100 GR ratings)
Super Underrated Books (fewer than 50 GR ratings)
Ridiculously Underrated Books (fewer than 20 GR ratings)
Really Underrated Children's Books (children's books with fewer than 100 GR ratings)
Just One Rating
Alternatively, see lists of books with the most ratings.
You might also want to check out obscure books worth considering: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...
1,834 books ·
268 voters ·
list created July 8th, 2009
by John Burns (votes) .
Tags:
best, fiction, great, least-ratings, literature, obscure, rare, ratings, too-few-ratings, underrated, unsung
John
854 books
53 friends
53 friends
Susanna - Censored by GoodReads
3386 books
852 friends
852 friends
Bettie
15673 books
19 friends
19 friends
Lobstergirl
5739 books
157 friends
157 friends
Lynda
22349 books
298 friends
298 friends
Karen
4382 books
37 friends
37 friends
Gwyn
1497 books
30 friends
30 friends
Morgan
1419 books
1068 friends
1068 friends
More voters…
Comments Showing 1-50 of 297 (297 new)
OK, but what about a book like Catch-22, which is at more than 4 times the max number of ratings for this list (40,000+ratings)? We need to cull books like that, or the list doesn't really mean anything at all.
Not necessarily GROSSLY too many, but decidedly in excess of 10,000 ratings:Stevenson, "Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde"
Wells, "The Time Machine"
Tolstoy, "War and Peace"
Dick, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"
King, "Cujo"
Also, the "main" (interlinked) edition of Kafka's "Trial" -- http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17... -- has over 10,000 ratings. Does it make sense to nevertheless list a separate (as-yet unlinked) edition here?
Themis-Athena wrote: "Not necessarily GROSSLY too many, but decidedly in excess of 10,000 ratings:Stevenson, "Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde"
Wells, "The Time Machine"
Tolstoy, "War and Peace"
Dick, "Do Androids Dream of ..."
Deleted.
As for the edition of The Trial on the list, it's a modern stage adaptation with its own playwright and thus on GR is separate from the original book. I left it because it has 14 ratings and there's no legitimate reason to delete it.
I see -- wasn't aware that it's an adaptation. If it only has 14 ratings, shouldn't it be on the list for SERIOUSLY underrated books, though?
Themis-Athena wrote: "I see -- wasn't aware that it's an adaptation. If it only has 14 ratings, shouldn't it be on the list for SERIOUSLY underrated books, though?"Good point. It needs to be deleted from here, and I don't know if there is such a list.
Or is that the other list I've been visiting? I'm so confused. At any rate, I deleted the Trial adaptation.
Removed, but added to the list of REALLY underrated books (fewer than 1,000 ratings): The Golden Ass and The Celestial Omnibus.
Removed for excessive ratings: The Last Olympian
The Hotel New Hampshire
Cujo
Ramona Quimby, Age 8
The Talisman
Removed for having less than 1,000 ratings: Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol. Based on the very small number of ratings, this book would certainly qualify for inclusion in the list of REALLY underrated books, though. (Won't add it there myself as I haven't read it.)
Removed for having less than 1,000 ratings: Alexandria: City of Memory. See previous comment on inclusion in the list of REALLY underrated books.
I don't know how much longer A Wizard of Earthsea will qualify for this list .... I just checked it and there are 9,975 ratings! 25 more and it hits 10,000!
Deedee wrote: "I don't know how much longer A Wizard of Earthsea will qualify for this list .... I just checked it and there are 9,975 ratings! 25 more and it hits 10,000!"I am very surprised to read that it only just crossed over. I would have expected it to be over that line quite a while ago...
Lobstergirl wrote: "Removed for excessive ratings: Winnie the Pooh."Funny how few ratings The House at Pooh Corner has, considering how well known the material in it is. I wonder if many people forget that it is a separate book.
Removed for excessive ratings: Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast, Blood Promise and Redwall.
Love the fact that the lists now display the number of a book's ratings, which is making it much less time-consuming to track what should and what shouldn't be on this particular list and the list for seriously underrated books. It would be even nicer if the number of ratings were updated in real time, as is the case on the individual book pages ... (E.g., Henry James' "The American" is still showing only 980 ratings here, whereas when you go to the actual book page, you find that the book has in fact over 1,000 ratings and is, therefore, quite rightly placed on this list. The same is true with regard to a number of other books, where the discrepancies are sometimes even considerably greater.)That said, removed for really NOT having enough ratings: Alone in Berlin and If This Is a Man / The Truce. (Needless to say, these may always be added to the list for seriously underrated books.)
Removed for having excessive ratings: School's Out - Forever.
Themis-Athena wrote: "Love the fact that the lists now display the number of a book's ratings, which is making it much less time-consuming to track what should and what shouldn't be on this particular list and the list ..."T-A, I posted the question in one of the Feedback (I think) threads of why a book would have a different number of ratings in two different places. The answer was that the lower number is actual ratings, the higher number is shelvings. I guess that means people have shelved it as to-read, or currently-reading or whatever, but have not actually rated it.
So these Listopias that depend on # of ratings may not exactly be totally accurate, depending on what number people are using.
Looking at this list is really interesting, especially in reference to other lists. Some books (Bleak House, with 5000+ ratings at present, for example) are VERY popular on Listopia—appearing in almost every list that they could conceivably qualify for—and yet do not, in fact, have very many readers. It makes me wonder: how far down the the Goodreads popularity list do you have to go—assuming there are rankings—before you hit the 10,000 mark? How much further below that is the 1,000 mark? What kind of curve do we see? And what does it mean if a book with only 5000 readers can mobilize so much enthusiasm, relative to a book with, say, 30,000?
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As goodreads becomes more popular the number of ratings for every book on this site will increase anyway, so this rule makes sense.