Books like Flowers for Algernon, according to Reddit

The read-alike list

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

#1

The Left Hand of Darkness

Ursula K. Le Guin

A human envoy crosses a glacier on foot with the one alien on the planet capable of ambisexuality, and neither of them trusts the other yet.

161 shared threads

#2

The Dispossessed

Ursula K. Le Guin

A physicist from an anarchist moon travels to the capitalist planet his people fled, carrying a theory of time that could unite both worlds or arm one of them.

125 shared threads

#3

Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut

Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time, bouncing between a WWII POW camp, a Tralfamadorian zoo, and his own suburban optometry practice, all at once.

66 shared threads

#4

Hyperion

Dan Simmons

Seven pilgrims travel together to a planet that kills, each one carrying the private story of why they volunteered to go.

184 shared threads

#5

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro

Three friends grow up in a quiet English boarding school where everything is normal except the one thing nobody explains to them.

56 shared threads

#6

Ender's Game

Orson Scott Card

A child prodigy recruited into Battle School at six ends up commanding real war fleets, believing until the end that it's all just a simulation.

113 shared threads

#7

Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell

A low-level bureaucrat rewrites yesterday's newspapers for a living, until he starts keeping a diary the government would kill him for.

54 shared threads

#8

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.

53 shared threads

#9

Dune

Frank Herbert

Paul Atreides survives his family's massacre on a desert planet and becomes the messiah the empire engineered him to be, then has to live with it.

155 shared threads

#10

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.

109 shared threads

#11

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.

147 shared threads

#12

All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries)

Martha Wells

A security android with no interest in gender, romance, or heroics just wants to watch its shows, and ends up saving its clients from a conspiracy anyway.

130 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 Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin — 161 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
2. #2 The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin — 125 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
3. #3 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut — 66 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
4. #4 Hyperion by Dan Simmons — 184 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
5. #5 Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro — 56 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
6. #6 Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card — 113 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
7. #7 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell — 54 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
8. #8 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury — 53 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
9. #9 Dune by Frank Herbert — 155 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
10. #10 Neuromancer by William Gibson — 109 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
11. #11 Blindsight by Peter Watts — 147 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
12. #12 All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries) by Martha Wells — 130 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF