Reading challenges will often have a "book published the year you were born" prompt - this could be helpful. The Good Housekeeping article only goes through 2016, so I have done my best with the following years. 2019 and 2022 were both Where the Crawdads Sing, so for 2022 I subbed in with the second most popular book, It Ends With Us.

I think reading the most popular book of the year would be interesting to see the types of subject matter and stories that readers were most interested and changes that take place over time.