r/booksuggestions · 2019
Most-mentioned books in r/booksuggestions during 2019
This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/booksuggestions within the published source unit for 2019. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.
#1 Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
J. K. Rowling
An eleven-year-old orphan gets a letter, a train platform that shouldn't exist, and a scar that makes him famous for something he can't remember.
#2 Mistborn: The Final Empire
Brandon Sanderson
A street thief who can swallow metal and burn it for power gets recruited into a heist crew whose actual target is the immortal emperor who's ruled for a thousand years.
#3 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.
#4 The Way of Kings
Brandon Sanderson
A bridgeman slave carries spears through a warzone he's not allowed to fight in, until he decides to become the soldier no one will follow.
#5 Red Rising
Pierce Brown
A low-caste miner surgically altered to pass as the ruling elite infiltrates the academy that killed his wife, planning to burn the system down from inside.
#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.
#7 The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien
A gardener and three friends carry a cursed ring across a continent at war, because the only way to destroy it is to walk it into the volcano that forged it.
#8 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.
#9 The Martian
Andy Weir
A botanist gets left for dead on Mars after a dust storm and has to grow his own food to survive until the next mission arrives, years later.
#10 American Gods
Neil Gaiman
Gods who crossed the ocean with their immigrant worshippers are going extinct in modern America, replaced by whatever people actually worship now.
#11 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.
#12 The Book Thief
Markus Zusak
A girl in Nazi Germany steals books while Death narrates, and it's become r/suggestmeabook's default answer to almost any request for something sad.
#13 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.
#14 The Blade Itself
Joe Abercrombie
A crippled torturer, a vain swordsman, and a berserker haunted by his own alter ego get pulled into a war none of them understand yet.
#15 Storm Front (The Dresden Files)
Jim Butcher
Chicago's only professional wizard takes a case involving black magic and a mob boss, with a police captain who wants it solved fast or him gone.
#16 Six of Crows
Leigh Bardugo
Kaz Brekker recruits five other criminal teenagers for a heist inside a supposedly impenetrable ice fortress.
#17 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.
#18 11/22/63
Stephen King
A substitute teacher steps through a diner's storeroom into 1958 with one job: stop Lee Harvey Oswald before Dallas.
#19 Flowers for Algernon
Daniel Keyes
Charlie Gordon's IQ triples after experimental brain surgery, then the same surgery begins failing, and he narrates his own decline in real time.
#20 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.
#21 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.
#22 Good Omens
Terry Pratchett
An angel and a demon who've grown fond of Earth team up to stop the apocalypse because neither wants their side to actually win.
#23 Circe
Madeline Miller
Exiled to an empty island for turning a rival into a monster, a minor goddess spends immortality perfecting the one power the gods never bothered to master.
#24 Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Engineered from a bottle into a rigid caste and dosed on soma, a man discovers he'd rather have real unhappiness than the world's manufactured peace.
#25 House of Leaves
Mark Z. Danielewski
A found manuscript describes a house whose hallway is bigger inside than the house itself, and its footnotes start unraveling the man reading them.