No responses here for over a week, so I thought I would look at popularity another way.
Here is a non-scientific analysis of what people on MR are actually reading.
I searched the
what are we reading thread for a few terms that were suggested in many of the proposed lists and the results are in the spoiler. Obviously this only counts the number of instances a word shows up and not all books that are discussed will include a genre keyword in the post, but it was easy. I would just search the reading recommendations forum, but the 500 result limit makes that less than helpful. "Oh look 500 results again, how fascinating..."
Do these results line up with what you expect? Any surprises?