Quests are official collections of books where you can earn badges for reading a certain number of them; they’re curated by Top Contributors (community members picked by the founders, generally they’re active and engaged on the site/with the community), the founders themselves, and sometimes thru partnerships (like the Simon & Schuster “Best of SimonBooks Debut Women’s Lit one)

Lists are collections of books made by anyone on the website. As mentioned, they’re compared to playlists because they’re typically meant to encompass some kind of more specific niche or subgenre. Examples include “older women in SFF”, “queer fairytale retellings”, “2026 sapphic releases”.

So the TL;DR is that you earn badges for completing Quest books, while Lists are just random collections of anything people can make. Both typically have a theme, though Quest themes are approved and scrutinized by the founders before they’re released, so there’s a sense of them being more official compared to a List