The Most Read Books on Goodreads in July 2026

How many of the most read books on Goodreads this month can you name? I’ll give you the genres, if you need a hint. In the top five, we have two thrillers, a historical fiction title, and two general fiction books. The #1 most read book this month is a controversial one: readers have strong opinions about this satirical tradwife thriller.Before we check your answers, though, let’s talk about a few books out in July that deserve more attention—especially since the full list of the top 50 most read books on Goodreads in July appears, at a glance, to be entirely books by white authors. Yikes. 3 New Books Out in July You Should Know About Unfortunately, the most read books on Goodreads tend not to be diverse by any definition of the word. So, here are a few new books that came out in July that deserve wider readership. Cool Machine by Colson WhiteheadAny release by a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is worth a shout-out. Plus, according to a few reviews I’ve read on Cool Machine, you don’t really need to have read the first two books in The Harlem Trilogy it belongs to. It looks at New York City in the ’80s and its explosion of real estate development, which gets juxta...