8 Fantasy Books With Over 100,000 Goodreads Ratings That Are Worth the Hype

Image via William Morrow Paperbacks Published Nov 12, 2026, 6:42 AM EST Jeremy has more than 2900 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows. His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings). When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account. He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas. Sign in to your Collider account As someone who’s used Letterboxd religiously for quite a few years now, the best way to explain it to people who've not heard of Letterboxd (they do exist, especially if you venture outside the online world!) is to say it’s like Goodreads, but for movies instead of books. And most people have heard of Goodreads, even if they don’t themselves have accounts there. If you're not in the know, then it basically lets you keep track of what you're reading, what you’ve read, and what you'd still like to read. You can rate titles, review them if you want, or even “DNF” them (marking something as “did not finish”). The site is a bit of a popularity contest, sure, but it’s interesting to see what appeals to people, with the following fantasy books all being quite loved on Goodreads, and more than 100,000 ratings each, not to mention generally high average ratings across the board, too. 8 'The Subtle Knife' (1997) Image via Scholastic UK His Dark Materials was a trilogy that’s since grown into a series, though it’s the first three books that are most essential. The Subtle Knife is the second, and probably the strongest chapter of that trilogy, since it skillfully adds another central character to the proceedings while effectively continuing on from the surprising way the first book (Northern Lights) ended, in relation to the characters who were established in that initial novel. The third book, The Amber Spyglass. is kind of chaotic, but still interesting, and the way the overall trilogy works in some science fiction elements alongside the fantasy as things go along is also pretty great. All have well over 100,000 ratings on Goodreads, and the only one that might cause some disappointment is The Amber Spyglass, and even then, probably only the final chunk of The Amber Spyglass, so it’s kind of a case of two-and-a-half out of three ain't bad. 7 'The Master and Margarita' (1967) Image via Vintage Classics Things sure do happen in The Master and Margarita, and it’s hard to call the book boring in any way, but then it’s harder to try to summarize all those things that do happen and articulate how those things converge into something potentially definable as a plot. It’s the kind of fantasy that’s heavy on surrealism and extremely light on explanations for why anything is happening, outside of saying “Oh, this madness is happening because it’s making some kind of satirical point about x.” And all that can be lost on you, if you're not knowledgeable about the history of the Soviet Union and maybe some other things (The Master and Margarita was written a few decades before it was ultimately published, and so knowing about the Soviet Union in the 1930s is more helpful than knowing its history closer to the middle of the century). Crazy things happen, you will feel like you're hallucinating at multiple points, and maybe it gets labeled as “fantasy” because it’s hard to know what other genre to put this one into. 6 'The Hobbit, or There and Back Again' (1937) Image via HarperCollins Publishers It is The Hobbit, or The Hobbit, or There and Back Again if you want to use its full title and all, so of course it’s worth mentioning for present purposes. J.R.R. Tolkien sure did write another legendary fantasy book that has an even stronger reputation, and that one will be addressed shortly, but The Hobbit, or There and Back Again is like a prologue or introduction to the whole of Middle-earth, but even if it weren't, it’d still be an extremely compelling work of fantasy in its own right. It has more than 4.6 million ratings on Goodreads, and then it has a very strong overall score of 4.3/5, so all that really just further cements how readable and essential this is. There’s a Hobbit here, and then a quest, plus some gold, and a dragon, so, like, lots of expected fantasy things, but the execution is what counts, and then there’s also the influential nature of The Hobbit, or There and Back Again to take into account. It has more than 4.6 million ratings on Goodreads, and then it has a very strong overall score of 4.3/5, so all that really just further cements how readable and essential this is as a fantasy novel. 5 'The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower' (2004) As is the case for most series, there are fewer ratings given out the further The Dark Tower goes along… but it is curious that the seventh book has a few more ratings overall than the sixth book. The idea of reading the seventh book without the sixth is wild, since the sixth book is almost entirely set-up for all the bombastic things that happen in book #7, but either some people forgot to rate the sixth book, or they treated their rating for The Dark Tower VII as a rating for the entire saga. If they're in the latter camp, that’s almost understandable, to be honest. The Dark Tower VII is such a grand finale to a weird and compelling series, and it represents The Dark Tower at its best, strangest, and most ambitious. It is one of Stephen King’s best books, without a doubt, and even if you’ve heard parts of it are, um, kind of divisive (to say the least), you still shouldn’t let that put you off finishing your own journey to the Dark Tower. 4 'Mistborn: The Final Empire' (2006) Image via Tor Books Like His Dark Materials, Mistborn was a trilogy that later became a whole series, whether you want to judge the Mistborn series as its own thing (thanks to a sequel trilogy and some other stuff), or whether you want to look at the whole of Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere saga as one massive series. Of that original trilogy, The Final Empire is the strongest entry, with its real sense of unpredictability and the way it works as something of a heist narrative with a fantasy setting. If you do like The Final Empire, then the chances of you liking books #2 and #3 are strong, too. And for now, Sanderson can only really be appreciated through books, but movie and/or TV adaptations of some of his works are pretty much inevitable (watch this space and all). Anyway, as for Goodreads, 1.1 million ratings, an average score of 4.48/5… yeah, honestly, fair enough. 3 'The Odyssey' (8th century BC) Image via W. W. Norton & Company More than a million people have rated The Odyssey on Goodreads, and it’s fitting that something so old and influential has been widely read. Maybe a fair few of those ratings came about because people were made to read it in high school, sure, but there’s a lot here worth studying and analyzing, to put it mildly. Whether to even call it a book, though, in the traditional sense is something you might be able to debate. Well, it exists as a book now, even if it was a story that was originally formed and told (rather than written down) orally. You can keep the tradition alive, to some extent, by listening to a recording of The Odyssey rather than reading it, because it’s one of those rare instances where listening to a book rather than reading it is technically an experience more in line with how you're “supposed” to take in the text. 2 'The Stand' (1978/1990) Image via Doubleday Books The Stand is another Stephen King book, sure, but this is a pretty different one from The Dark Tower VII, even if both The Stand and The Dark Tower (as a series) feature Randall Flagg, admittedly. The Dark Tower was a bit of every genre, including dark fantasy, whereas The Stand… okay, The Stand also belongs to a good many genres, just not really the Western one, nor a few others. It’s still very much dark fantasy, though, leaning more into that than science fiction, even if the majority of books about the end of the world (and what comes after) do so with a sci-fi spin rather than a fantasy one. The Stand is also huge, especially if you read the uncut version published in 1990, yet it’s incredibly rewarding and makes those hundreds upon hundreds of pages fly by real fast. 1 'The Lord of the Rings' (1954–1955) Image via HarperCollins There are different ways you can rate and review The Lord of the Rings on Goodreads, owing to how it was published in three parts, even if it’s technically one huge novel. Any of the three parts on their own would be worthy of putting in the top spot here, and then if you add all those parts together, and read The Lord of the Rings as one epic, then yeah, obviously it’s even more worthy of topping a ranking like this one. All the parts have had more than 1,000,000 ratings each, and each of those three parts has a high average rating overall. If you find The Lord of the Rings as a single volume on Goodreads, then the average rating there is also extremely high, at 4.55/5, and there are more than 700,000 users who've rated it as one complete book. Beyond iconic, essential as both literature and entertainment, timeless, yada-yada-yada, all that stuff can be said because it all applies. It’s The Lord of the Rings, you know?