Three podcasts have recommended thousands of books between them.a Nobody was keeping the list.b This site keeps it.c The same books keep coming back,d and that recurrence is the whole point:e a shelf assembled from what a conversation kept reaching for.f
Measured by parsing every episode page of The Seen and the Unseen. The two YouTube shows are identified but not counted yet.
The books raised in the most episodes of The Seen and the Unseen. Counts are of episodes, not mentions, and are provisional until each title is matched to a canonical record.
What the sources give, and what the site makes of it.
Source, one episode resource list
A numbered list of links under the heading Also check out, mixing books with essays, videos, profiles and the occasional song. The book entries carry a title and a bookshop link and nothing else. There is no indication that the same book appeared in fourteen earlier episodes, because from inside one episode there is no way to know.
Catalogue, the same item
The link becomes a record: the title, the episodes that reached for it, and who was in the room. Read down the list and a book stops being a mention and starts being a position the show keeps arguing from.
Links to The method
Show one is extracted and the two YouTube shows are queued. Nothing here is a guess: every figure on this page is computed from parsed sources, and the method is written up in full.
Read the method