The Top 10 Kindle Books Glasp Readers Highlighted in May 2026
Ten books. Hundreds of readers. And the exact lines they each stopped to underline.
Hi friends,
Here’s something we noticed while pulling this month’s most-imported books.
Read them in order and a quiet argument starts to form — one that none of these authors coordinated, and that this month’s highlighters seem to have arrived at independently:
Ability isn’t something you’re born with. It’s something you build.
Carol Dweck calls it a growth mindset. James Clear says to forget your goals and trust your systems. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans tell you to stop planning your way forward and start building your way forward. Three different decades, three different fields — and our highlighters underlined the same idea in each.
So this month we’re not just sharing what got imported. For every book, we’re showing you the single line that the most readers stopped to highlight — what we’re calling Reader Consensus. It’s the closest thing we have to a room full of strangers nodding at the same sentence.
Here are May’s top 10.
If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.
📚 The Top 10
1. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Carol S. Dweck — Stanford psychologist whose decades of research on motivation gave us the “fixed vs. growth mindset” framework.
“Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?”
Reader Consensus: 11 of 25 highlighters underlined this exact line — 44% of everyone who marked the book.
🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (14) · Português (12) · Deutsch (1)
📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp
2. Educated
Tara Westover — historian and memoirist who left an isolated survivalist upbringing in rural Idaho and didn’t set foot in a classroom until 17.
“You can’t be a person without a birthday.”
Reader Consensus: 2 of 12 highlighters — 17%.
🌐 Top highlights in other languages: Deutsch (1)
📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp
3. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
Greg McKeown — writer and speaker on focus and priority; “essentialism” is his name for doing less, but better.
“...only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution.”
Reader Consensus: 12 of 35 highlighters — 34%.
🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (59) · Português (12) · Español (5)
📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp
4. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari — historian whose sweeping account of how Homo sapiens came to run the planet became a global phenomenon.
“Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in.”
Reader Consensus: 14 of 53 highlighters — 26%.
🌐 Top highlights in other languages: Español (11) · Português (5) · 日本語 (1)
📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp
5. Meditations
Marcus Aurelius — Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher who wrote these notes to himself, never meaning for anyone else to read them.
“...it is not objects and events but the interpretations we place on them that are the problem.”
Reader Consensus: 10 of 22 highlighters — 45%.
🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (13)
📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp
6. Designing Your Life
Bill Burnett & Dave Evans — Stanford design professors behind the wildly popular life-design course. Burnett directs Stanford's Design Program; Evans is a co-founder of Electronic Arts who once led product on the first Apple mouse.
“The five mind-sets you need: curiosity, bias to action, reframing, awareness, and radical collaboration.”
Reader Consensus: 10 of 25 highlighters — 40%.
🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (7) · Português (3)
📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp
7. Atomic Habits
James Clear — writer on habits and decision-making whose framework for tiny, compounding changes has sold millions of copies.
“A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about your goals and not enough time designing your systems.”
Reader Consensus: 25 of 73 highlighters — 34%.
🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (44) · Español (3) · Deutsch (2) · Français (2)
📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp
8. The Dark Forest
Cixin Liu — China’s most celebrated science-fiction author; this is the second novel in his Hugo-winning Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy.
“For the majority of people, what they love exists only in the imagination.”
Reader Consensus: 5 of 9 highlighters — 56%.
🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (2)
📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp
9. The 5 Types of Wealth
Sahil Bloom — writer and investor whose framework reframes wealth as five dimensions: time, social, mental, physical, and financial.
“Your wealthy life may be enabled by money, but in the end, it will be defined by everything else.”
Reader Consensus: 6 of 10 highlighters — 60%.
📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp
10. Supercommunicators
Charles Duhigg — Pulitzer-winning journalist and author of The Power of Habit, here on the science of connection and conversation.
“To communicate with someone, we must connect with them.”
Reader Consensus: 9 of 13 highlighters — 69%, the highest agreement of any book on this list.
📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp
📈 Discovered in May
A different cut: three books where this month wasn’t just a good month — it was the month most of their all-time highlighters arrived.
The 5 Types of Wealth — nearly half of everyone who has ever highlighted it (43%) did so in May.
The Dark Forest — a third of its highlighters (30%) landed this month.
Supercommunicators — a quarter of its highlighters (25%) arrived in May — and it still posted the single highest Reader Consensus in the whole top 10 (69%).
New books don’t usually agree with their readers this fast. These three did.
❤️ Before you go
Every line above came from someone who took the time to mark it. That’s the whole idea: when you highlight on Glasp, you’re not just saving a sentence for yourself — you’re leaving it for the next reader.
If any of these books are on your shelf, import your highlights and add your own underline to the count. Next month’s consensus is being written right now.
See you in the margins, The Glasp Team
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