It's a list of books per topic that the author thinks are valuable books for some topic. With the link through to Goodreads, it actually probably doesn't really

It's a list of books per topic that the author thinks are valuable books for some topic. With the link through to Goodreads, it actually probably doesn't really matter _why_ the author liked it - I don't know the author, so the authors reasoning would be the opinion of a random person, and Goodreads collects the opinion of a whole bunch of random people. So why this article? Yeah, it is pretty much a discovery mechanism. To me, the author is saying "I liked these books," or "I think these books are good," and "Here's what other people said about these books." I knew of some of the books and I didn't know of others, so mission accomplished, to be honest.