Books like The Lord of the Rings, according to Reddit

The read-alike list

Ranked by co-mention strength — how often each book shares a thread with The Lord of the Rings, normalized so ubiquitous books don't dominate.

#1

The Hobbit

J. R. R. Tolkien

A hobbit who has never left his own pantry gets recruited by thirteen dwarves and a wizard to steal treasure back from a dragon.

88 shared threads

#2

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.

278 shared threads

#3

The Eye of the World

Robert Jordan

Trollocs burn a village hunting for one of three farm boys, so an Aes Sedai spirits all three out before anyone learns which.

79 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.

212 shared threads

#5

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.

87 shared threads

#6

Foundation

Isaac Asimov

A mathematician predicts the empire's collapse centuries out and plants a colony at the galaxy's edge to shrink the coming dark age from thirty thousand years to one.

122 shared threads

#7

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.

131 shared threads

#8

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams

Earth gets demolished to build a hyperspace bypass, and the last man alive escapes only because an alien researching a galactic encyclopedia needed an assistant.

87 shared threads

#9

A Wizard of Earthsea

Ursula K. Le Guin

A proud boy on a poor island learns real magic, casts one spell out of arrogance, and spends the rest of the book hunted by what it let loose.

76 shared threads

#10

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.

58 shared threads

#11

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.

119 shared threads

#12

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.

117 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 Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien — 88 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
2. #2 Dune by Frank Herbert — 278 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
3. #3 The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan — 79 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
4. #4 Hyperion by Dan Simmons — 212 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
5. #5 Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson — 87 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
6. #6 Foundation by Isaac Asimov — 122 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
7. #7 Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card — 131 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
8. #8 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams — 87 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
9. #9 A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin — 76 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
10. #10 A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin — 58 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
11. #11 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin — 119 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
12. #12 Neuromancer by William Gibson — 117 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF