Books like Crime and Punishment, according to Reddit

The read-alike list

Ranked by co-mention strength — how often each book shares a thread with Crime and Punishment, normalized so ubiquitous books don't dominate.

#1

The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Three brothers, a murdered father, and a murder trial become the frame Dostoevsky uses to argue about God, guilt, and free will for nearly a thousand pages.

4 shared threads

#2

The Master and Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov

The devil arrives in 1930s Moscow with a talking cat and a magic show, and the story keeps detouring into Pontius Pilate's Jerusalem.

3 shared threads

#3

The Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas

A falsely imprisoned sailor spends fourteen years in a fortress, learns of a hidden fortune, and returns to make sure everyone who wronged him pays for it.

3 shared threads

#4

Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy

A teenage drifter joins a scalp-hunting militia across the Texas-Mexico borderlands, led by a hairless giant who may not be entirely human.

3 shared threads

#5

A Game of Thrones

George R. R. Martin

Ned Stark's family gets pulled into a succession war for the Iron Throne while an unkillable winter creeps south.

4 shared threads

#6

The Name of the Wind

Patrick Rothfuss

A legendary hero narrates his own rise from orphaned street kid to feared arcanist over three days, except Rothfuss never wrote day three.

3 shared threads

#7

Snow Crash

Neal Stephenson

Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for the Mafia, moonlights as a hacker-samurai, and stumbles into a virus that infects minds instead of computers.

7 shared threads

#8

Neuromancer

William Gibson

A washed-up hacker gets his nervous system rebuilt for one last job, in a world Gibson invented before the internet existed to copy it.

7 shared threads

#9

Gardens of the Moon

Steven Erikson

A continent-spanning empire's mage-soldiers besiege a city that might already be doomed by gods playing a board game with human pieces.

4 shared threads

#10

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury

A fireman whose job is burning books meets a girl who keeps asking why, and can't stop asking himself the same question afterward.

3 shared threads

#11

The Three-Body Problem

Liu Cixin

A disillusioned physicist's daughter answers a signal from another star and invites the invasion of Earth out of spite for humanity.

6 shared threads

#12

Blindsight

Peter Watts

A crew of post-human specialists, one of them a resurrected vampire, gets sent to first contact and finds aliens that may not be conscious at all.

7 shared threads

The overlap, in numbers

Where each pairing actually shows up. Click through for the full Reddit verdict on each book.

1. #1 The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky — 4 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
2. #2 The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov — 3 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
3. #3 The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas — 3 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
4. #4 Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy — 3 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
5. #5 A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin — 4 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
6. #6 The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss — 3 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
7. #7 Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson — 7 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
8. #8 Neuromancer by William Gibson — 7 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
9. #9 Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson — 4 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
10. #10 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury — 3 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
11. #11 The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin — 6 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
12. #12 Blindsight by Peter Watts — 7 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF