What people are reading on YouTube: Prince Harry's Spare to Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

To celebrate its 'BookTube' community, the online platform has released a list of popular titles most discussed over a decade

Prince Harry's memoir Spare has been a popular talking point on YouTube. EPA

Vampire novel Twilight by Stephenie Meyer and Prince Harry’s memoir Spare are some of the most discussed books on YouTube, the platform has revealed.

Celebrating its burgeoning community of literary content makers, accessed under the #booktube hashtag, parent company Google has unveiled a list highlighting the popular books featured in videos from 2012 to 2023.

Dubbed BookTube’s Ultimate Reading List Through The Years, it was extrapolated from the more than 636,000 videos featured with the hashtag. YouTube told The National that, combined, these garnered more than 350 million streams in 2024 alone.

The reflective initiative is even highlighted by YouTube’s first-ever "Yoodle" – a graphic atop the YouTube website similar to the Google Doodle.

Book titles are presented chronologically according to the year they were most featured on the platform (rather than their print release date) and many have been dissected by the community’s leading content creators. Highlights include a variety of genres, from popular and young adult fiction to hard-hitting literary works, but YouTube is yet to provide as explanation as to why the years 2017 and 2022 were omitted from the round-up.

YouTube Mena's partnerships manager, Tanya Khoury, says the listed books also resonated with regional BookTubers. She cites the growing popularity of Saudi Arabia’s Dupamicaffeine (5.87 million subscribers) and Egypt's Nedal Reads (398,000) as indicative of a dynamic online book-loving community taking shape in the Arab world.

"BookTubers have started a very influential and inspiring community on YouTube for over a decade now. In Mena, we’re seeing a similar trend with more and more creators joining this journey of appreciating books, and sharing their own analysis,” she says.

“We are grateful for all BookTubers in Mena and globally, who share their passion every day to make reading a cultural event and to bring people together to think, brainstorm and share ideas.”

What are people reading on YouTube?

Big-selling titles are featured throughout the collection, but often not in the year they were originally published. A trend emerged as literary works saw a BookTube peak as their film adaptations hit theatres.

Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, which was popular in 2012, was published four years earlier. Its online popularity can be attributed to the first instalment of the film franchise, which was released that year. The same is also true of 2008’s Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, another BookTube favourite in 2012. This was the same year the five-part film series it spawned ended with The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2.

BookTubers are also unaligned to the timeline of bestsellers lists, with some titles becoming talking points years after publication. Junot Diaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, hit bookshelves in 2007, but caught fire on BookTube in 2014. The same goes for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's stunning 2013 novel Americanah, an online favourite in 2019.

As for 2023's Spare by British royal Prince Harry, BookTubers were on the pulse, with the memoir being the most discussed of that year.

Check out the full list below:

BookTube’s Ultimate Reading List Through The Years (2012 - 2023)

2012

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

The complete Harry Potter series by JK Rowling

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

2013

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

2014

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

2015

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

2016

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas

2018

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Be

2019

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey

2021

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Normal People by Sally Rooney

2023

Spare by Prince Harry