Now here’s an interesting stack of books…
 
To honor the conclusion of the first quarter of the new century, we’ve ventured deep into the archives for this special collection. We’ve gathered below a collection of books that have maintained a full 4-star rating, over the years, here at Goodreads.
 
It's trickier than you might think, even for notoriously popular titles. The books are sorted by publication date, meaning the degree of difficulty gets harder as you move backward through time. It’s actually pretty hard to maintain a 4-star average rating as more and more people find the book and weigh in on their experience.
 
As you might expect, there are some stone-cold classics in this collection. Liu Cixin’s sci-fi masterpiece The Three-Body Problem. Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer Prize–winning family saga Middlesex. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s social critique/epic love story Americanah.
 
You’ll also find some beloved genre classics—Naomi Novik’s delightful fantasy Uprooted comes to mind—and a few relatively obscure titles with rabid fan bases, like Mark Z. Danielewski’s weird fiction puzzler House of Leaves. Plus the occasional left-field supernova.
 
Scroll down to move backward through time, or up from the bottom if you prefer the tyranny of standard temporal policy. Click on the book cover images for more information about each title, and use the Want to Read button to add any interesting classics to your reading shelf.